I decided a few days ago that Fridays at burpobanter.com would be reserved for flashbacks – or a look back at old pictures or a repost of previous “banters,” if you will. I did this for two reasons: 1) Because I’m guessing it’s rare that I’ll be motivated to write a full post on Friday nights and 2) I thought it might be fun. For me at least.

That said, first allow me to say that today was quite a nice day. And I mean that literally, to begin with. After several days of gloomy, somewhat chilly weather, we had one of those days today that we live for in Portland…high 70s and not a cloud in the sky, and of course no humidity (sorry east coasters). Picture perfect, really. And it’s supposed to be that way through the weekend. This afternoon I was invited to spend some time out and about in the zoo touring the construction site for our new Veterinary Medical Center that is scheduled to open in December. It’s one of the first projects that has been undertaken within the bond program. And, wow. It’s going to be such a great, state-of-the-art facility that, like all else the zoo is planning for the future, is pushing the envelope in terms of how we care for the animals. It’s pretty cool.

After that, I escaped a bit early to enjoy the sunshine. Soon after, Jeff and I convened at home and picked up the Burplings together, and headed straight to the Pearl for dinner at OBA! It was a nice change from our usual suspects…more like a restaurant where we’d typically go on a babysitter night – except that as suspected (we had been there a couple of times before, sans kids in tow), they were extremely kid friendly and we had a fantastic server who was very conscious of the fact that we didn’t have all night to lounge around. We always love it when we get servers who “get” us. And, all of our dinners were fantastic. It was like a great combo of feeling like an actual “adult” restaurant while being kid friendly, which is pretty great as far as we are concerned. It’s a definite addition to our family restaurant list.

Anyway, getting back on track: I’ve had vacation on the mind a lot lately – particularly the fact that we haven’t had one for way too long – so in honor of my vacation dreams, I though I’d post a photo of one of my favorite vacations to Honduras. It was the year before Ian was born and Jeff, Jeff’s sister Jill, and I spent several days traveling there and it was fabulous. I’m really hoping that we can take Ian and Elena to Central and South America when they are old enough to appreciate it. In the meantime, below is a picture of a day trip that we took to snorkel off the Honduran coast. We stopped at this tiny island for lunch, which consisted of a freshly-caught whole grilled fish and rice. It was one of the best days of our trip, though they were all great.