Once More to the Lake

Waiting for a Table at the Diner

Looking for the Perfect Tree

Still Looking

The Joy of Tree Hunting

Beth and Marisa 

Opening Presents

We are up early, 5:30 for some reason, both of us down in a quiet house on our computers, as we await the rising of the Albarran family.  We hope to get off by 7:00 at the latest though we probably could leave much earlier but we want to say good by.

We had a very busy Sunday, starting off with a great breakfast around 10:00 at a local diner, packed with people, a line out front but it moved surprisingly fast.  I had huevos rancheros, Beth a Cuban breakfast, the others the usual eggs  and pancakes except Tyler, who had both.  We then headed off to a tree farm, an amazing operation of a couple of hundred acres of trees.  They actually had a least two areas for customers, with shops, food, a tree bundler, rest rooms.  There were at least a hundred cars in the lot, people picking out trees, cutting them, leaving them on the side road, a truck coming along and bringing them to the bundling area, a neat machine that wraps string around it, making it easy to take home.  On our way to the farm, we must have passed at least 20 cars with trees on their roof racks, so this is the place to go.  After about an hour, we picked out a 7/8 footer to bring home.  We stopped at  an apple farm, got some apple dumpings for home, then Rami and I headed off to the Apple store to get a new router and external hard drive, while the rest picked up ribs for dinner.

Rami and I then spent a good part of the afternoon setting up the router, transferring all my pictures to the hard drive, as we watched football.  We then decorated the tree, which went pretty fast with 7 of us and it looks great, the right size for the room and not too much decoration, just enough.  There house, as usual, looks amazing with all the Christmas decorations in every room.  Beth made her specialty ribs for dinner and they were amazingly good, cooked in the oven for 3 hours, tender and juicy, and we all stuffed ourselves with them, beans and cole slaw.  We relaxed after gift giving, then watched some tv before we headed off to bed, all of us quite tired.  A great day in Darien as usual with Beth and Rami and their great kids.