Rachelle and Lynda, ready to go. And Dallas clowning.
Our golf cart caravan is off!
Most of the taxis (all?) were this redish maroon color. They were also really cheap.
Brett taking a photo of me.
U-turning with a taxi in the middle!
Sara and Brian.
We had 8 or 9 carts with 4 people in each.
Vanessa and Damian.
Christine and Adam.
Kelly and Todd.
Hugs! We made it to Garrafon de Castilla!
I do not know what Lynda and Josh are doing back there!
Pretty Isla street.
Isla Mujeres statue.
Dallas, sun is setting on a long day.
Josh returning the cart.
On the Thursday before the wedding, Brian and Sara planned for everyone to rent golf carts (about $40 for the entire day) and do a snorkeling outing/pub crawl. We all met up at the Ixchel Beach Hotel, where we were staying, and went from there.
Isla Mujeres does have cars, but the main modes of transportation are scooters and golf carts. I’d say scooters for the locals. We saw whole families all fitting on one scooter. And many kids piled on. I think most of the golf carts are tourist’s rentals, though tourists also rented scooters. The carts are more practical, though, because you can fit four people on them and stuff easier.
Here’s the thing I realized very quickly that day: There are not many rules in Mexico. Drunk driving? Ok. Driving while drinking? Ok. Seatbelts? No. Speed limits? No. Drinking out of glass bottles on the beach and in the ocean? Ok. Snuffing out your cigarette in the sand? Yep. Obeying traffic laws? Nope. In other words, I thought we might die. But, we all did ok.
These were our stops (and I’ll have more photos of them coming up):
On Saturday Paul Baker and Kate got married. The ceremony was at St. Vincent de Paul Church in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. I hadn’t been inside an old Catholic church for so long, and this one was gorgeous. Tons of stained glass and sculpture and carvings. The ceremony was about 45 minutes long, just short of the hour we’d expected. A Catholic wedding in less than an hour!? Wow! It was a beautiful ceremony, though, and didn’t really feel like that long.
Kate & Her Mom
Kate
Alden, a groomsman
Jessica, Alden, Rachelle
Outside the church everyone gathered and chatted. Paul and Kate had some photos taken at the church. Look how gorgeous Kate looks! Her hair was so vintage Hollywood, but still modern. And when she was walkign down the aisle and passed us, Jess and I couldn’t get over how gorgeous the back of her dress was. Between that and her hair, I apologize in advance for how many photos I took of her facing AWAY from me! Also, her mom made the bouquets for Kate and her bridesmaids and the boutonnieres for Paul and the groomsmen and table decorations at the reception. They were so unique. No flowers. Peacock feather accents. I loved them. Very subtley fall-like.
We caught up with some FeedBurner coworkers from back in the day. We had about two hours before the reception was to begin and were figuring out what to do. Eric and his wife were going to check into their downtown hotel. Jon was headed home to get his wife before the reception. Alden was a groomsman and had wedding duties to attend to. That left me, Jess, Dallas, Chris and Lisa. We dropped off Jess’s car and then Chris and Lisa were nice enough to drive us to Old Oak Tap for a drink and then to the reception. Side note: Jess and I had a delicious cocktail called The Champfleur, made with Champaigne and St. Germaine elderflower liqueur, that was so good!
Salvage One
Rachelle, Paul, Dallas
Kate
Salvage One
Jessica, Rachelle, Lisa
With LEGS and LIGHTS
Salvage One
Jessica, Kate, Lisa
Rachelle, Jessica, Kate, Lisa
Salvage One
The reception was at Salvage One, which is this amazing space filled with salvaged materials. Anything from a bowl to a stone column to couches and lamps and windows and bath tubs. Everything you could ever think of. This stuff is all for sale, but Salvage One is also an event space. I can’t think of a better business model: Let’s sell merchandise and on the off hours we’ll charge people to use the stuff that’s not sold yet!
Salvage One is so unique and gorgeous inside, though. I loved how it was not just one wide-open room. There were so many nooks and corners and different seating areas. When we arrived drinks and hors d’oeuvres were being served on the first floor. We ran into Paul right away and gave our congrats and talked to him about the ceremony and the party. He said that Kate had been to Salvage One years before with her uncle and knew then that she wanted to someday have her wedding there. Dallas and I spent some time just walking around. There’s so much to see. I wanted to redo my whole condo with vintage, antique things. Later on we talked with Kate, told her how gorgeous she looked. She told us about the things her mom made. And how she was wearing her grandmother’s jewelry. So nice. Oh, and see her shoes in the dragon photo? We learned later on during a toast/speech that those were the shoes Paul proposed with. He gave her the shoes for a gift and the ring was tied in the shoelaces. So awesome.
Rachelle & Alden checking out the reply cards
Masquerade masks & candy
Eric & Christine before dinner
Chris trying his mask on
After a while we were ushered to the second floor where there would be dinner and dancing. There weren’t seating assignments to pick up, but we were still greeted with a table of goodies. There were masquerade masks and later on Halloween candy, for Halloween weekend. Paul and Kate had a doodle area on their RSVP cards and they displayed all the cards with doodles. They also had a “wish tree” where people could leave wedding wishes and advice and then hang it on a small tree.
Food Stations
Mashed Potato Magic Bar
Pasta Station
Harvest Martini Salad Bar
Salad
Wedding cake
Cutting the Cake
Cutting the Cake
Paul and Kate coordinated a very unique wedding dinner. Instead of a meal served family style or a buffet, they had stations. There was a carving station, a pasta station, a salad bar, and a mashed potato bar. At each station, except the carving station, you could customize what you wanted. So, the potato bar had regular mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes and you could pick your toppings. At the salad bar you told the guy what you wanted and he mixed it up in a cocktail shaker and served it in a martini glass. Mashed potatoes were in a martini glass as well. At the pasta station you could choose from several kinds of pasta and pair different sauces and toppings. So fun. I never saw so many people excited for mashed potatoes.
For dessert, they had a funnel cake station! You could choose whatever kinds of toppings you wanted for your own customized funnel cakes. There was also two different cheesecake shots, fruit and wedding cake.
FeedBurner reunion! Chris, Eric, Joe, Rachelle, Jessica, Jon, Alden and of course Kate & Paul
I know Paul from when I worked at FeedBurner.. and Google. Paul is still at Google, but only a few of us are left there. It was so fun to see some of my old friends from those FeedBurner days. A couple I see often, but it was fun to have a mini reunion of sorts. I mean, even just getting eight of us together is like getting a third of the whole company together!
Marveling for the 100th time over Kate’s hair & dress.
Alden & Chris’s Thriller zombie dance.
Taking a rest after a long night of dancing.
Rachelle, Jessica, Alden
I don’t know who Paul and Kate’s DJ was, but someone told me he once played with Moby? I don’t know if that was just a wedding rumor, but he was good. He had people dancing all night. Except for one song that I didn’t like and the wine made me tell Kate I didn’t like it. Oops. Otherwise I had so much fun dancing it up with Chris and Lisa and Jess and Alden. What a great party with so many fun and unique details. Congratulations to Kate and Paul and thanks for inviting us to share the day with you!
Before you read any of this, know that you have to sing the post title to the tune of Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA,” because that is Brian’s favorite song.
Christine and Adam and to the left, Adam’s brother Todd
Larry and Lilia, Ang & Murph
Brian, Sara, Kelly
Larry is a giant.
On Saturday night we went out for Brian’s birthday. Sara, his fiance, arranged for 16 of us to have dinner at Sakura Teppanyaki. This was a Benihana kind of place where they cook the food on a hot grill in front of you and put on a show. Uh, not that I’ve ever been to Benihana, but I went to a similar kind of place on Mauai called Kobe Japanese Steak House way back in 2009. I haven’t been to anything like this since.
Lots of shrimp, scallops, lobster, chicken and steak.
Our chef messing with Brett & Kelly.
Setting up the onion volcano.
The volcano.
All of the teppanyaki dinners were served with a grilled shrimp appetizer, miso soup, salad, grilled vegetables and fried rice. Then you got to pick what kind of entree you wanted. There was a selection of different kinds of fish, chicken, steak, filet mignon, shrimp, scallops, lobster, or calamari. Or you could get a combo. I got steak and scallops. And I upgraded my fried rice to chicken fried rice. I liked everything I had, except I wouldn’t recommend the upgrade to chicken fried rice. It’s not worth it. Otherwise it was all good. Dinners range from about $18 – 30. Not too expensive for all of the food you get. I was so stuffed at the end of dinner.
As for our chef, he was pretty funny. He quickly detected which were the people to mess with and playfully teased them while cooking our dinner. He kept saying “No sake bomb, no happy!” so we bought him a sake bomb when we got a round for the table.
Almost all the ladies were drinking these 100-calorie martinis (on the left), sake bombs on the right.
Here’s the set up: Glass of beer, sake balanced on chop sticks.
All set?
Larry showing Brian how it’s done. Everyone pounds the table.
Then the sake falls into the glass. You can see Larry’s chopsticks flying and the sake glass inside the beer glass.
Our table had countless rounds of sake bombs. I think I had 2-3 total, but some people had more. A sake bomb is served with a glass of beer and a shot glass sized serving of sake. The drinker takes their chopsticks and lays them across the top of the beer pint glass. Then they balance the sake on the top of the chopsticks. This can be tricky after a few drinks. Ask Lynda. She accidentally dropped hers in early twice and had to drink her bomb before everyone was ready.
After you have the sake balanced you pound the table and it causes the sake to fall into the beer. The should be drank immediately. To be honest, the sake bombs mostly just tasted like beer to me, but because everyone feels the need to race and chug, and the fact that there is sake in there, it can make you drunk fast. Also, the sake glass falling into the beer can be really messy. I had a lap of beer on the first round. On the second I just dropped the sake in instead of doing the chopsticks and pounding. Not as fun, but definitely less messy!
After dinner we headed over to some really cheesy Lincoln Park bars. Good thing I was drunk because these were not my kind of places! I asked Brian if I was going to feel like an old lady at the bar we were headed to. You know… not old, just too old for the club, but he said just to sit back and watch and laugh, and so I did. So, we headed to Beaumont, which most people seemed to have been to but not for a long time and not proudly. And not so early. It was dead when we arrived. No one else was there. But in no time if was filled with single 20-somethings. It was actually kind of painful to watch.
The Store til Four
Don’t ask. It was late. I get the willies just looking at this photo!
Later on we went down a few buildings to The Store.. ahem… The Store til 4. Any bar with “til 4″ in the name is probably not a good idea. I’m looking at you Tai’s til 4! I learned that lesson a few times many years ago. But Dallas and I didn’t stay out anywhere near 4 a.m. I think we caught a cab home at 2 or so.
I didn’t see Brian on Saturday but I saw him for a while on Sunday at The Scout in the South Loop where we were eating lunch and watching some football (Packers won! Lions lost! We’re the best in the league!) and it seemed like he had a good birthday weekend!
Dallas and I have had our hand-me-down Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo for the past two years and it has really served us well, but it is 13 years old and starting to show its age. I especially was not totally trusting it any more after the breakdown I had between Chicago and Milwaukee over the summer. How much money in repairs should we put into a car whose value is only a couple thousand dollars at the most? Also, when would the next break down be? And how much would it cost? And we’d have to repair it if we wanted to sell the Jeep. Can’t sell it broken down, so we were probably for sure in for another repair if we didn’t decide to sell it now.
Over the past few months we did a ton of online research into what type of vehicle we might want if we got a new one. On summer road trips to Wisconsin we looked at every car and talked about what we liked, how they looked, along with the research we’d done on each model. We decided we wanted a crossover, which is built on a car platform but combines features of an SUV with features from a car. But which crossover? Just about every car manufacturer makes a crossover these days. They’re very popular. So we made our lists of our top picks. I liked the Honda CR-V and the Nissan Rogue, maybe one of the Hundais. Dallas liked the CRV and the Mazda CX-7. He also liked an Acura, but they tend to cost a bit more than we could afford to spend.
This past weekend we finally had a free day to go out and test drive. We’d done as much on-the-street and internet research that we could do and we needed to get into the cars and drive them, see what they feel like. So, we got up early and drove out to Golf Road in Schaumburg, where we could try all of the cars in one general place. Golf Road has a ton of dealerships. We started off at Schaumburg Honda, since we both liked the CR-V. The CR-V was a big upgrade from the Jeep, which we were used to, but something about it… it was missing a luxe element. Something seemed cheap to me. Which, btw, I was totally fine with, if the price tag matched, if it was the economy option, but it didn’t really seem to be. Next we visited Woodfield Nissan to drive the Rogue. I really liked this car. The Rogue just felt different than the CRV. It had more design elements. It had a bunch of extras like a rear view camera and keyless entry and start and satellite radio for the exact same price as the CRV. It just felt like you were getting more with the Rogue.
Let me just say also that these two dealerships, Honda and Nissan, were really cool. No pressure, really friendly and knowledgeable salesmen. Very attentive. Very happy to just have you look at the vehicles and drive them and get to know them better. No pressure to get you to the desk and start wheeling and dealing. And then, AND THEN, we went to Napleton Schaumburg Mazda where we couldn’t find anyone to help us. Granted, the place was really busy, but no one even said hi or acknowledged we were there. Dallas was ready to leave without even driving the CX-7, but I got aggressive and just grabbed a guy walking by. This was a mistake. We should have left. We took a test drive with this guy but he didn’t know anything. Dallas was telling him things about the car. And all the guy really wanted to do was tell us how great the dealership is and sit us down to price out financing. Ugh! Dallas really liked the CX-7, but I was having a terrible time separating our bad salesman/dealership experience with the car itself.
So, I was still liking the Rogue the best. Dallas was liking the CX-7. We got lunch at Buona Beef and randomly ran into our friend, Adam, whose girlfriend, Christine, owns the Rogue. I’d talked to Christine previously and she seemed happy with it, but Adam said he thought that after 2 years it was running clunky. He didn’t know how to describe it, but it wasn’t as great as it used to be. He didn’t recommend we buy the Rogue. I took this advice with a grain of salt, but I did really want to look at the CX-7 again. Somewhere else. On the drive home we looked up the Mazda dealer in Highland Park and drove all the way up there only to find out that it’s now a Honda dealer. We were both kind of ready to give up, but I looked up one more Mazda dealer that was sort of on the way home, it was the Autobarn in Evanston. I’d never even been to Evanston before!
Ok, so let me just say. This Mazda dealer was about a thousand percent better than the other one. We worked with Andre and he was very knowledgeable and nice. We drove the CX-7. He left me alone for a while while I sat in the car and took it in, playing with all the options and really thinking about whether I liked it or not. I did. I liked it a lot. I liked the design and all the options. I thought that it seemed like a more serious car than the Rogue. The Rogue was fun, but it seemed kind of fey in comparison. And Adam’s comments made me wonder if they were trying to wow people with fancy extras but maybe the core of the car wasn’t up to par.
To make a long story short, we haggled, we haggled a lot, we had to be ready to leave. I absolutely hate the “game” but we played it. I thought I was going to barf, I thought I was going to cry. I almost did cry. We almost walked. We second guessed our decision. I didn’t like the way that this dealership played the game, but does anyone like this? It’s terrible. I always feel violated. We spent three hours going through the motions at the Autobarn… but, again… long story, short…. this is our new car!
I believe we got a good deal on it. I know we did. And Mazda is offering 0% financing through the end of the month, so that will really save us some money. But neither Dallas or I have had a car payment for about 10 years, so it will be an adjustment to our budget. I have to admit, after being put through the ringer all day, I almost started cry while leaving our Jeep as a trade in, but it will be worth it. The CX-7 is fun to drive, safe, and will give us the peace of mind we were looking for. We plan to have this car for like… ever. So it was a big decision for us, but I think we made the right one. After a couple days, I’m almost over feeling violated and can actually enjoy the new car smell. Almost. If you know me, this isn’t a surprise. haha
Chopped Salad, Filet Mignon, Chicken Paillard, Quiche, Braised Brussels Sprouts, Pommes Puree, Macaroni Gratinee, Raspberry and Almond Tart, Dark Chocolate Mousse
Taylor
While the downstairs of the Paris Club was warm and cozy, the upstairs bar was very lounge-y and the outside area (covered in the cold) was very stark. All cool in their own way.
Garrett, Bill
More food! Chilled seafood bar: Lobster Tails, Shrimp Cocktail, Tuna Tartare, Crab Salad
Garrett, Geoff
Many giveaways! PS3, Slingbox, fancy headphones, a camera, Xbox Kinect, iPad, Google TV, sound dock, and a bunch of $100 gift cards
Tonya was a winner!
Craig’s turn to win!
Jeremy won the Google TV
Christine & Geoff pulling out more names.
Marlena had her eye on the prize.. and later on won the Xbox Kinect.
Wa-jiw, David, Ben, Nick
Mike, Adam
Passed hors d’oeuvres were pommes frites, mini burgers, deviled eggs with bacon and toasted cheese on brioche.
This year was a bit different than previous years in that it was smaller and it all took place in one day. Usually everyone from every other office – New York, Denver, Boston, and various other locations – flies into Chicago for a huge 2-day event. There would be practice meetings all day Thursday, a party all that night, and then the next day would be an all-day company meeting. This year we had two meetings on the same day – one in Chicago and one in New York. East Coast people flew into New York and others flew into Chicago. We had the meetings and the party all in one day. And it didn’t go late, which was good for me, because I had things I needed to get done that night!
Overall, it was still a great party. I didn’t win anything, but it was nice to hang out at the Paris Club and eat delicious food and spend time with my coworkers, not working. That’s not to say we didn’t have hours of meetings that day, but it was a good change of pace.
If you know me, this isn’t a surprise. haha
