Strawberry Banke & Portsmouth

On a recent interview in New Hampshire (or New Hampster according to Alyssa) I had a chance to visit Strawberry Banke. Now a museum, it was the first settlement in the state. The oldest standing building was built in 1695. It is the dark brown house on the right of the picture below, next to the flag.
Below is a peek throught the entrance of the children's garden at Strawberry Banke.
The town is now Portsmouth. Below is one of the current houses. I was fortunate enough to be in New Hampshire at the peak of fall foliage.

Below are pictures of a church in the middle of town and one of the main streets. If you are ever in southern Maine or the New Hampshire coast it is worth a stop to look at the shops and architecture.

Albuquerque Part 2

The last day in Albuquerque Alyssa and I tried to see as much as we could before starting the long drive back to Phoenix.

Our first stop was the Natural History Museum. This is Alyssa in the lobby by the T-Rex. She looked at it for a while, then started walking hunched over. When I asked her what she was doing, she said in as deep a voice as she could manage, "Walk like a dinosaur." Every so often, she still walks like a dinosaur.

This was one of Alyssa's favorite rooms. Have I mentioned she is obsessed with water? There were sharks and sea stars in a tank, and fossils and replicas of aquatic creatures. I had a hard time getting her to leave so we could see the rest of the museum.

I had heard about a train that made an hour long loop between the zoo and the botanical gardens. Little did I know that in waiting for the train, we would also see the spot where the world's largest trout had been caught. Don't you just love random things like that? Alyssa really liked the fish. She kept running over to touch it.

And here we are on the train. Alyssa wanted to ride in the red car, so we did. There were two tunnels, which she absolutely loved. After the train we picked Dan up and headed back to Phoenix. The ride home wasn't quite as smooth as the ride out, but we made it! Then of course, in keeping with our crazy summer, less than 48 hours later we were in Las Vegas.

Dolphins in Vegas

After a surprise last minute trip to Albuquerque, we flew out to Las Vegas for a few days. The group I was interviewing with put us up in top floor of the nicest hotel I have ever been in.Alyssa liked the bed.

Unfortunately we were so tired from the Albuquerque "shuttle run" style trip earlier that week (Marie will blog about that one later), that we didn't get out and enjoy Vegas as much as we could have. We did however get to see the dolphins at the Mirage. Alyssa loved it.Back at the hotel she combined her two highlights from the trip by taking her toy dolphin onto the bed and jumping on the bed and yelling "Jump like a dolphin!" We caught a clip of this on video:

Old Town Scottsdale

Does anyone else feel like the are always playing catchup with their blog? We came out to Phoenix almost three weeks ago, and I'm just now getting to Phoenix pictures.

We love Old Town Scottsdale. There is a great mix of art galleries, jewelry stores and Old West inspired themes. We love to stroll around. This was Alyssa's first trip to this part of Scottsdale. The second picture is of Alyssa picking out her favorite polished rocks at one of the souvenir shops. We finished off this great, albeit very HOT evening with a trip to the Sugarbowl.

Catch up. More Florida pictures

Now two months late I'll finish off with a few pictures from our Florida trip. After Key West, I went to a meeting in Miami. Marie took Alyssa to the Seaquarium and a mall while I was busy. Then we had a day and a half at the end see the sights. We each picked one thing to see and then at the end of the trip took alyssa to the Zoo. Marie picked the Vizcaya, a mansion built to look like a renaissance Italian villa. I was happy with that because I like architecture, and because it is named after one of the provinces where I used to live in the Basque country. They didn't allow pictures inside, so here are a few from the grounds:

My pick was a fan boat ride in the everglades. Marie was less thrilled with my pick but was kind and indulged me. The water level was low so the gators were all concentrated near the streams. There were dozens of them. Whenever we stopped, the big ones would head toward the boat to check things out until we got moving again. We got stuck in the mud on the way back and everyone had to stand on the front of the boat to rock us out. A poor british woman was pretty scared. It was great fun.

Oh yeah, now at swim lessons Alyssa always picks the alligator squeaky toy to play with.