As promised, here’s the follow-up post to the previous Food & Wine Experience teaser post. Sadly, the weekend is now over, but we had a ton of fun. The drive up wasn’t too fun because after we passed approximately the half-way point between Milwaukee and Minneapolis it started snowing. Jessie was driving and (stubbornly) wouldn’t let me drive, but she did just fine and we made it to the hotel without getting lost in downtown Minneapolis, which is a feat in and of itself. We crashed at the hotel that night and woke up the next morning very excited for the show. The five of us that drove up (Obviously myself and Jessie, but also our cousin Jill and our friends Katie & Jeff) woke up and were on our way to the Minneapolis Convention Center. Thankfully, we only had to dredge through the snow for about a block and were then able to enter Minneapolis’s great downtown skyway system and could get the rest of the way without going back outside. We got there at about 9:45 and were only about 15 feet back in line.

At 11, they opened the doors and that’s when the real fun began. As everyone flooded in to the room we immediately started weaving our way through the convention center eating and drinking anything and everything that was offered to us. Except for a few things that I can honestly say were pretty nasty (some sort of 19-fruit juice with a plum base sicks out in my mind), everything was fantastic. Jeff and I, being fans of beer, were amazed at the amount of beer there was this year as opposed to previous years. In previous years there had only been maybe a half dozen breweries with booths, but this year there were 12 breweries almost all of them with their entire assortment of beverages for us to try. As always, the cheese booths were fantastic. Wisconsin cheese manufacturers always have a great representation there and it was as tasty as ever. Some of our favorite wines that we no longer have access to here in Milwaukee were also representing, so getting to taste them again was a nice treat. I really can’t even list everything that was great there, but in true Oscar style, I’d like to give a shout out to the various chocolate booths, the various imported Mexican beers, the loaf of sourdough bread that Au Bon Pain handed out, all of the cheese, and, of course, the wine.

Once all was said and done, Katie and I were able to make it there until 6:00, while Jessie, Jeff, and Jill weren’t far behind and lasted until 6:30. We all stumbled back to the hotel room and watched Forrest Gump and I think we all fell asleep pretty early. The drive back wasn’t anything special, although Jessie let me drive this time. We made good time and did just about nothing once we got home.

Now I have to wait another year until the next one!

Well, this is the weekend! After work tonight myself, Jessie, and our cousin Jill are driving up to Minnesota for the Twin Cities Food & Wine Experience. For those of you that don’t know what this is, it’s an annual convention (for lack of a better term) that is hosted in the 100,000 square foot rooms at the Minneapolis Convention Center. It’s an enormous convention room which is filled wall-to-wall with over 300 exhibitors offering their food, wine, beer, other beverages, candies and chocolates, cooking demonstrations, and much more. This will be the 6th straight year that Jessie and I have gone and it’s something that we hugely look forward to each year. It all starts at 11 tomorrow (saturday) and we’ll be there nice and early so we can get in first thing and stuff ourselves. If you couldn’t tell, I’m pretty excited. I’ll post here again when I’m back in town.

Ok, so we’ve actually been living in Milwaukee for a few weeks now, but it didn’t really feel like home until I had my cat (she’s been staying with Jessie’s parents since before the wedding) and my broadband cable Internet access. Well, we’ve now had the cat and our Time Warner cable Internet for about two weeks and Milwaukee is starting to feel like home again.

So far our apartment is great. We’re very close to the main strip of Kinnikinnick in the up-and-coming Bayview neighborhood of Milwaukee and so far I like it. I don’t quite know where I’m going yet or what there is around here, but I’m sure I’ll learn with time. The few resturaunts we’ve discovered in the area have been very good and it looks like there’s plenty of other fun stuff to try and do in the area as well. We also live down the street from the newest Outpost Foods and have even become owners in the coop! (On a side note, until just now I had never seen a domain ending in .coop) For those that don’t know, it’s an entirely organic foods coop and Jessie and I are going to start eating a lot healthier because of it.

Also, its been great to be able to see our families. Having lived 350 miles away for seven years, we’ve been missing all of the holidays, birthdays, and other get togethers with our families. I was just recently able to wish both of my parents happy birthday in person for the first time in probably 5 or 6 years. I know they’re glad we’re back and just incase they read this, they should know that so are we.

Also, we live near married friends now! We barely even had friends who were couples in Minneapolis, but now all of a sudden we have friends who are also married. Yeah, it’s odd. I think this last paragraph makes me old.

Well, that’s all I can think of to say right now. The cat is being a brat and trying to wake Jessie up, so I’m going to go try to put a stop to that.

I promised I’d talk about our honeymoon in the previous post (not that anyone other than me reads this), so here it is! I’ll try to keep it short, but every time I say that it ends up being lengthy.

It… was… awesome.

Honestly, we had a terrific time. I couldn’t have asked for a better honeymoon. We stayed on the big island of Hawaii at The Bay Club resort at Waikoloa beach. The timeshare condo we stayed in was nicer than any place Jessie and I have lived in together, by a long shot. We got to do all sorts of awesome stuff while we were there. We went snorkeling at Waikoloa beach and saw all sorts of cool fish and coral. We did tons of shopping in Kona, Waikoloa Village, and Hilo. We took a glass-bottom boat tour and saw and even larger variety of fish and coral and later that day a sea turtle decided to pull itself up on to the beach and said hi to us. Beyond just looking at cool fish, we ate some very tasty and very fresh fish including Mahi Mahi, Ahi tuna, Striped Marlin, and Ono. We also got to see a rain forest with all sorts of cool plantlife and a very awesome three-tiered waterfall. Oh, did I mention the volcano? We took a helicopter ride out of Hilo and went over the active volcano and saw one of the more active flows in years as well as Rainbow Falls.

Everything was thoroughly awesome, and that’s just the brief summary. Have I said awesome enough? Because it was very awesome. Awesome awesome awesome. There, I think I’ve covered how awesome it was.

Ok, so I lied when I said I’d keep it short. Remember to check out the pictures!

I know I posted about it forever ago, but I finally got the raise to technician at work this week! I haven’t gotten my A+ certification yet, so I’m not quite a full tech yet, but I’m feeling a lot more confident about taking that test, so that will come soon. I’ll likely still be performing a lot of the same tasks that I had been previously until we hire and train in a full-time service writer to replace me, but now at least I’ll be getting payed more to do it, so who am I to complain?