This weekend’s ***Mystic Meetup|http://gallery.prwdot.org/mystic_meetup*** was great. I really haven’t had that much fun in a long time. It was terrific getting to hang out with Bob and Jeremy and to catch up with everyone.
Becky and I drove down to Connecticut early on Saturday. We stopped at ***IKEA|http://www.ikea.com/*** in New Haven first. This is a fairly new IKEA, and is much smaller than the one we’ve visited before in Paramus, NJ. We saw lots of great stuff there, but didn’t make any major purchases.
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We then headed over to explore Mystic a bit before checking into our hotel. The hotel, a Days Inn just off I-95 in Mystic, was clean and comfortable and inexpensive… we had nothing but compliments for the facility. With a free continental breakfast and easy access to the highway and other attractions, it was a good deal.
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For dinner, we met Bob and Leah at the hotel, and went to ***Anthony J’s|http://www.anthonyjsbistro.com/*** in Mystic. Becky and I had some great stone-fired pizzas, while Bob and Leah had pasta. Very delicious, cozy atmosphere, decent prices.
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After dinner, we went back to the hotel where Jeremy and Angela had just arrived. We all got together in Bob’s room for a little birthday party for Bob and Jeremy and watched ***The Village|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0368447/*** on pay-per-view. I got Bob and Jeremy a copy of Martin Luther’s ***Ninety-Five Theses|http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?item_no=525571&netp_id=283764&event=ESRCN&item_code=WW*** for their birthdays, which was sort of a gag gift but sort of not, since they’re both big fans of Luther. We all had a great time hanging out in the room in our PJ’s, cracking jokes, catching up, and reminiscing about days gone by.
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Sunday morning we all met for the hotel’s free but fairly decent continental breakfast. We then headed off to the ***US Navy Submarine Force Museum|http://www.ussnautilus.org/*** in Groton. Admission and parking were free, and we got to check out a lot of nifty exhibits and history of submarine warfare. One of our favorite things was the periscope room. There were three periscopes you could look into which were actually working and could show you views of the parking lot – see example:
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We even got to tour a historic submarine, the USS Nautilus. The Nautilus was the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, launched from Groton on January 21, 1954, and decommissioned on March 3, 1980.
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We closed out our time together with lunch at The 99, and then we all headed our separate ways: Bob and Leah back to northern New Jersey, Jeremy and Angela back to Cape Cod, and Becky and I back to the North Shore of Boston.
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It was altogether a great weekend. Unfortunately weekends like this can’t happen too often, with our geographical separation. But nonetheless it’s fun when it works out.
The full gallery of the weekend can be found ***here|http://gallery.prwdot.org/mystic_meetup***.