Out on a thursday night. Thank you Amanda!
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new digs…
After months of searching Liz and I have contracts signed (and are in the process of getting a mortgage) on an apartment up in Harlem.
Place is amazing. A little bit outside our comfort zone of the village. What will we do without drunk college kids screaming outside our window keeping us up at 3 in the morning???
Grabbed a few photos:
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- bedroom
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- living room into the kitchen
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- living room into the den
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- kitchen
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- main bedroom down the hall
Mt. Rainier! (nope Maine 5.0)
Unfortunately, do to circumstances entirely outside of our control, we had to cancel our Mt. Rainier climb this summer.
We are waiting to hear how it went from our Kili guide, Eben.
Instead we packed the bags and used Liz’s free companion ticket on Delta for a relaxing trip to Maine.
The usual menu of golf, water skiing, lobster and grandpa’s heroes.
This year we added pancakes to the agenda and had a pancake cook-off with the rents. By unanimous decision we won but go ahead and vote for yourself…
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- blair and john’s
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- liz and james’
Raffles Resort – Canouan Island
Yay! a week off in the sun…
Used my free AA companion ticket to head down to Raffles Resort at Canouan Island. We had two sets of friends stay here for their honeymoons and they all loved it!
Evidently I’m doing something right because we got upgraded to the rain man ocean view suite.
New experience for Liz, we sat on our a$$es under and umbrella and drank rum punch. I’m hoping Liz nows sees the light about how nice it can be under an umbrella, next to the ocean with a book. We did nothing. Played a round of golf, ate, read books, ate, saw turtles mating, and ate. V relaxing.
Here are some pix:
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- the tram to the spa
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- right into the window
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- our rainy day
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- fore
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- very artistic
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- yes… turtles mating
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- and the result… baby turtles
the first new Rubinstein baby…
Well, not sure if I already mentioned it on the blog but my baby brother, six years my younger, beat me to the punch and went and made a baby.
Little Benjamin David Rubinstein was born on 5/12. Perfect height, perfect weight. Perfect baby.
Take a look…
skiing, climbing and weddings oh my.
The last 2 weeks have been busy:
Michelle and Scott’s wedding: congratulations! we had a blast at the wedding.
My birthday – Liz surprised me with an hour private climbing lesson at Chelsea Piers. I forgot just how sore you get after an hour on the wall. After that it was dinner at Resto. Where ‘they are bringing fatback’. Really… they put a slab of fatback on your burger. It was actually a little too rich for me. But 2 bottles of 12% beer helped take the pain away.
Spring skiing – I took liz on her first 50+ degree ski weekend up at Okemo. The mountain was still in pretty good shape and we skiied in jeans and t-shirts. Somehow I still managed to get taken out by some idiot plowing down that mountain at extreme speeds. luckily, no torn rotater cuff this time. Also had a great beer and hotdog out in the sun after the day was over.
sunny ski days
More climbing – We hit the stoneagerock gym outside Hartford. Liz got her belay certification and I am only moderately afraid for my life when she is on belay.
Noah gets married! (or 48 hours in New Orleans)
Well, we spent a whirlwind 48 hours in New Orleans for cousin Noah’s wedding. Welcome to the family Missy (we hope you will guest blog for us).
We had a blast with the fam. We ran, saw the garden district, drank hurricanes, ran, saw Tulane (on our shuttle ride in), drank hand grenades, walked around the French Quarter, drank huge ass beers and celebrated at a beautiful intimate wedding at Muriel’s right in Jackson Square.
From what we could see New Orleans is back to its old glory since Katrina. While we heard that some of the outer areas are still pretty bad, downtown is in great shape.
It was a lot of fun and is on the list of places to go back to if we have some time.
the bride and groom (i think they're gonna be ok!)
drinking problem?
Africa – Recap
Well, we made it up to the top and back. Had an amazing time and now have the post-trip blues.
Altogether we hiked 61km (38 miles). From Machame Gate (1,800m) to Uhuru peak (5,895m) was 4,095m and back was 8,190m or 26,900 ft (5.1 miles) of vertical.
We hope you had as much fun reading the blog as we had writing it. Your comments really were fun to read and kept us going as we were pushing up the mountain.
Not sure what is next exactly, but we are thinking about trying to get to the top of Rainier this summer.
We are retiring our rubinations.wordpress.com and hosting the blog ourself at http://blog.rubination.com
The pictures (ours and the rest of the team’s) are available at (http://photos.rubination.com) and you can see our personal photos (the expanded edition) on Picasa.
Also I updated the map so you can see our camps, the path we took, altitudes and approximate distance at this google map location. There is also a link for our safari.
If you have google earth installed, you should launch the Kili trip. The 3D views and detail is incredible. It is almost (almost) like being there.
Trip home
So we landed in Schipol with a 6 hour layover. And like any good world traveller we cleared immigration, took the train to/from Amsterdam Centraal, walked the streets of the red light district, had a croquette and made it back to the airport.
Also Eben changed a tap in the basement of one of the bars in the red light district. Classic.
We had some drinks at the bar and are ready to catch our flight back to the states.
Anyway, be home soon and we’ll be at BLT burger tonight.
Safari – Day 3 – Lake Manyara Serena Lodge
Today we got to explore the interior of the Ngorongoro crater.
The crater is about 19km across and has about 300 sq km inside. The crater walls rise nearly 700 m from the floor (quite steeply). Because of it’s shape animals rarely ever leave or enter creating a microcosm of life.
We added to our animal list today with:
1) Snipe Eagle
2) Jackal
3) Black Kite Hawk
4) Crow Crane
5) Flamingo
6) Spotted Hyena
7) Rhinocerous (pretty far away)
8) Umbrella tree
9) Morning Glory flower
We also got to see some more lions mating. Did you know they mate every 15-25 minutes for 7 days only stopping so the female can hunt and bring food to the male so he can keep his energy up? Tough life for the king of the jungle.
Also we saw a wildebeast give birth. Honestly, it’s disgusting.
After lunch we started our drive back to Arusha where this trip comes to an end. Tonight we are staying at the Lake Manyara Lodge. Thankfully, we actually got here early (for a change) and had some downtime by the pool.
We are having dinner at 7:30 and then have our last night out! Tomorrow is almost entirely a travel day so expect this to be the last update before we get home…
