Should wine seal the deal?

Last night was a great wine tasting at the university club, sponsored by vintage cellar. The stats: 7 importers, each with 9-10 wines. I made it through 5.5 importes before the time ran out. I believe nji tasted every one! Comparing Italy to France last night, I'm partial to the Italian wines. Although they were all quite good, and I certaintly didn't spit any out like those too-good-to-swallow tasters. (I know, given my entertaining demeaner last night, maybe I should have.)

So, the question is, should we make travel decisions based on wine preferences?

Narrowing our options

We've narrowed our trip down to two options. Each option consists of two locations, so we'll spend about 3-4 days at each destination.

1. Venice + Italian Riveria(exact location TBD)
2. Paris + other France (Bourdeux, other wine region, mini-tour-de-france, ?) or another city(Amsterdam, Brussels, ?)

Still looking for your opinions....

Where should we go?

The chewies need your help. We have roughly 6-10 vacation days to take. Where should we go? We just got Malayna a passport, so we're thinking we should take advantage and leave U.S. soil for a change.

A few general places on the list so far are the following: Mexico City to visit my brother and then possibly on to South America, Northern Italy, France and/or Spain, England, Ireland. I know we're all over the place and have significant narrowing to do once we pick a region...hence the shout out for help!

Broken Rules

So we went away last weekend, but we didn't get back until Monday morning, so I'm really not too far overdue. I have a couple of excuses...although not very good, but potentially entertaining.

1. When Mark and I travel, we take the P.M. (pre-M) travel time and add 30% to get our current travel time. Therefore, since we are talking about traveling here, this applied to the 48 hour rule, I get an extra half day. Guess I'm still late!
2. I tried to post on Wednesday and Blogger wouldn't let me log in.
3. Pictures were posted on the msn space.
4. It was technically a work trip.

Anyway, we recently returned from a trip to Ocean City, NJ. It's nice to have parents living at the beach. I think it's slightly making up for having to grow up far from the beach. Although, I bet my surfing skills would be considerably better had I learned as a kid! Then I'd really be addicted. Unfortunately the water is way too cold to go surfing right now, unless you have the incredibles wetsuit.

The excuse for the trip was spring cleaning on the house. It rained much of the weekend, so we actually made progress on the house. Big-M played "computer-guy" and set up networks, lil-M played her usual entertainer role, and I just flew the kite and ate pizza on the boardwalk when the sun came out. We all played skeeball, including lil-M. I think big-M and mom both scored high enough to win free games. Quite the value at 10 cents a pop! My dad and I were both terrible. I'm always thoroughly entertained by the boardwalk, but the beach and the waves are still my favorite. I would argure they are the keys to the boardwalk's success.

We also had nice pit stops on the way up and back with Mark's fam in otherwise crazy NoVA. Mark's brother's wife is about to pop out a cousin for lil-M, so it's fun to see the growth!

A few pics are posted on the Space.