Pining for the Fjords

As you can tell from scanning through any of my past November posts on the blog, this is the month when we normally end up participating in one of the Ragnar Relay series of events.  Although we deviated from our normal last year and ran the Los Coyotes event in 2016, we all determined that McDowell was a much better option (in that, we didn't end it wanting to murder ourselves), so when registration opened a few months back, we hopped right on that business. Initially, our team consisted of Chris and myself, our buddies Jen and Bryan who live in Tucson (Bryan was Chris' manager at the CVS Pharmacy in Casa Grande), my coworker, buddy, and coach Luis, my friend Christina (we met through Chris working with her husband Amadeo at Gore), our good friend Jake, and our friend Ryan.  With the exception of Christina, who was a total Ragnar newbie, all of us had Ragnar'd together before (albeit not all at the same time), so we all knew what to expect and how the event would unfold....

Find Part 6 here .  You really should read these in order. After we finished up at the Cleveland Museum of Art and wished Uncle Jim and Aunt Kim safe travels, it was back to the VRBO for Mom, Leigh, Chris, and I.  Jim and Ethan finished dropping off our Sunday travelers and then headed back as well.  We pawned off the vast majority of our leftovers on Ethan ("here's a bag of three leftover bagels, half a jar of salsa, four squares of breakfast casserole, and 2 apples!"  It's like a really boring episode of Chopped ), and then he headed home as well, leaving just Mom, her kiddos, and their spouses to hang around. We spent some time pre-packing; while we'd all be leaving the next day, Jim and Leigh had a painfully early departure time of 6am, and we'd follow just a few hours later, so it was a good idea to get some things taken care of.  Around 6:30pm, we headed out (in just one car this time!) to downtown Cleveland to meet our 7pm dinner reservation at Lola...

If you didn't see  Part 5 , you missed our entire reason for visiting Cleveland! Sunday morning dawned pretty slow for most of our crew, which was understandable, as many of them had been up late, drinking and carrying on, the night before.  I woke up at a reasonable hour with a sore throat (which later bloomed into a head cold - hooray!), but I figured this was mainly due to yelling across tables and dance floors for several of our previous nights.  By the time I got moving, Leigh was already awake and studying for her upcoming GRE (she's looking at working on her PhD soon), so I joined her to read while we waited for everyone else to start stirring.  Eventually, they did, and as we all got moving, we enjoyed a fantastic meal of our traditional holiday breakfast casserole, as well as fruit and odds and ends we had left over from previous mornings. Since we knew we'd be tired from the wedding festivities on Saturday, and there was a home Browns game at 1pm, we le...

Back to Part 4 ! After spending the morning at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it was back to the VRBO for us to rest up and recuperate for our late afternoon/evening event, the whole reason we were all in Cleveland, cousin Ashley's wedding! The wedding and following reception were held at the beautiful Walden Inn and Spa in Aurora, a suburb about 40 minutes away from downtown Cleveland.  We got to the venue in plenty of time and had the opportunity to see Uncle Doug (Ashley's Dad), meet Brandon (the groom) and Noelle (their daughter), as well as catch up with Jodi (Ashley's Mom, who I hadn't seen in enough years that it took her a good 15 minutes to figure out who I was).  We also had the chance to grab tons of family shots before the wedding started, and the grounds of the Inn were a fantastic place to do so. Us inside the main hall area Following Jim and Leigh's Impalar on the way to the Inn. Look!  Trees with colors! Lots of permutatio...