The Camaras

The thoughts and lives of the camara family. Ross Camara Nicole Camara

Archive for August, 2009

Family in DC

August 31st, 2009

Ross and I are excited to have lots of family (Crnkoviches) in the DC area now. When we first moved to Baltimore, we were the only ones. In the last year, however, 4 of my other cousins have made it to the area. It’s nice to have them all so close.

A few weeks ago, one of our family members (Jenn) was in DC for some training for work. We were able to get together with Jess, Glenn and Jenn for dinner in DC at Capitol City brewing company. It was great to catch up with Jenn — we hadn’t seen her since about the same time last year before she moved out to SanFran. While we were all sitting at dinner, we realized we completely forgot to invite another cousin, Sarah, to join us for dinner. Whoops!

The following weekend, Ross and I met up with Sarah to check out the newly renovated American History Museum. It was one of our favorite museums before it closed a few years ago for extensive renovations. Although it has re-opened to the public — they are not totally done with renovations and many areas of the museum were still closed off.

One of the biggest parts of the renovations were a new entry and Star Spangled Banner Exhibit. I love the abstract flag that hangs in the main entry near the entrance to the Star Spangled banner exhibit — it was pretty cool.

My two favorite parts of the museum were/are the First Lady’s dresses and Julia Child’s kitchen. Since the museum isn’t finished, the first lady exhibit is quite limited. I was disappointed that Michelle Obama’s dress was not on display. I did learn something new though – Did you know that the first lady was not necessarily the president’s wife? It was historically a hostess position, and was often taken over by the president’s daughter, niece or other relation.

Sarah and me checking out the dresses

Julia child’s kitchen was always a favorite of mine at the museum. With the release of “Julie and Julia”, I think the exhibit got a lot of extra traffic. It was fun looking at the layout of her kitchen (very functional), seeing her original stove (which she used for ~50 years), and all the cooking gadgets she had.

We went through a lot of the rest of the museum, but ran out of steam to go through it all. We’ll have to go back and see the rest. Good thing the Smithsonian museums are all free =)

Ross and Nicole in Atrium

Sarah and Nicole in the atrium

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Tags: crnkovich Family food Washington DC

Restaurant Week

August 30th, 2009

Ross and I are determined to enjoy and take advantage of ‘city living’ while we are here. Last week was restaurant week in DC, and we took advantage. We decided last minute to find a restaurant and after looking at many menus decided to try Bistro Bis. Since we waited until the last minute, the only reservation we could get was at 5:45. Although it was early, we figured we would still enjoy the yummy meal.

Restaurant week means 3-course meals for $35.09. Some restaurants offer a very limited menu, but Bistro Bis offered almost their full menu (with a small upcharge for some of the more expensive menu items). Bistro Bis is a french bistro style restaurant in the Capitol Hill area of DC. Ross and I took advantage of our metro-accessible location and took the metro to Bistro Bis.

Starters:

I stared with the caramelized pear, endive, blue cheese salad. I would say the salad was okay – not enough blue cheese or pears for my tastes — and I learned that I don’t really care for endive.

Ross started with the mussel and liguica appetizer, in a sweet tomato broth. The serving size was huge — almost a whole meal in itself. He really enjoyed the mussels, the sausage and broth.

My monster appetizer which had a ton of mussels

Main Course:

I had the sea scallops served over a cauliflower mousse. The scallops were huge and perfectly done – so yummy!

Ross has the pork belly served over polenta with a corn and butter bean salsa. He really enjoyed the pork belly.

Dessert:

Ross and I were in such a hurry to eat our yummy desserts that we forgot to take pictures. I had a lemon sponge cake with lemon mousse served with a blueberry sauce. Light and summery. Ross had an apple tarte Normandie – traditional French apple tarte — also very yummy.

Because it was restaurant week, and the restaurant was full of people who wouldn’t normally splurge on such a fancy restaurant — Ross and I decided to play tourist and take pictures of ourselves and the food. Hopefully we didn’t make too huge fools out of ourselves.

As we were finishing our main course, we ran into some of our friends at Bistro Bis — totally by coincidence. Ross’ friend Aaron and his girlfriend Jenni were seated next to us — they had also made reservations for Bistro Bis that night for restaurant week. It was fun running into them! Although, later Aaron texted Ross saying they got a free 1/2 bottle of wine…we were a bit jealous. Wonder how they managed that one.

Ross and I had a great time at restaurant week and will partake in it again in January.

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Tags: crnkovich Family food restaurant Washington DC

‘The Beach’

August 30th, 2009

There is a small natural beach on the lake. Growing up, I think we went to the beach almost every day. This year — we only made one trip out to the beach. We had the little strip of beach to ourselves for a little while and then it got crowded (by crowded, I mean 2 other families came). It really is nice to be able to vacation on such a quiet lake.

Boys and digging holes…

Ross napping on the beach

Reading and napping on the beach

Beautiful view from the beach

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Tags: beach crnkovich Family fun vacation

Hanging out with family

August 30th, 2009

When we weren’t picking blueberries, on a boat, playing in the water or catching frogs, we just generally relaxed and hung out with family. This included a lot of game time, sitting around and chatting (or ‘talking story’ as Ross would say), reading books and napping. One of my favorite games was Rummikub, we also played a lot of dominoes and group games. Most of the Crnkoviches/Carrys/Camaras like to read books – so there were always people reading.

Everyone sitting around talking after dinner

Playing Rummikub

Reading

The boys “sumo wrestling” where they put on many layers of life jackets and then wrestled.

Hiking up Blueberry Mountain

August 30th, 2009

As our only hiking trip on vacation, we decided to hike up the favorite blueberry mountain. Now, there are no hiking trails in Canada since there are so few people — so we just make our way up the mountain the best we can. Our guides (Aunt Carla and Uncle Andy) did a really good job leading us up and down approximately the same path. The mountain is called blueberry mountain because there are lots of blueberry bushes along the way. However, this year there were way fewer blueberries on blueberry mountain than were on blueberry island. We found lots of bear scat on our way up the mountain indicating that the bears were having a good time eating blueberries. We did end up getting enough blueberries for Grandma to make blueberry pancakes the next day. On a side note: I much prefer blueberry picking on blueberry island than blueberry mountain, because then you don’t have to worry so much about dumping the blueberries on your way back down the mountain.

We like doing the blueberry mountain hike because it has great views at the top of both Lake LaCloche and the North Channel of Lake Huron. Thankfully, there was a nice breeze when we got to the top – and we all relaxed and enjoyed the view and breeze once we got there.