Old Friends and New Beginnings

 

So last winter two of my college friends and I started a new tradition.  In December 2010, we rented a cabin in Tamworth, NH and brought our girlfriends along for a weekend of day hiking, sitting by the fire, cooking and enjoying each others company.  This year due to scheduling issues, our weekend getaway was postponed to be an early Valentine's Day getaway, and we couldn't quite travel back up to the White Mountains (it was a bit too long a drive for us since my girlfriend didn't get off of work until 5 on Saturday).  Instead, we decided to meet halfway between where they are (Boston), and us (Philly).  We settled on New Haven, figuring we could relive some of our college glory.  We rented a beach house on the Long Island Sound in Milford, CT and the six of us met there to enjoy each others company.

In the time between our last weekend getaway, both Will and Laura (my two college friends) have gotten engaged to their girlfriends, so this was also a little bit of a belated celebration of Will and Rachel's (his fiance) engagement (Lindy and I had gone up to Boston to celebrate Laura and Meg's engagement last fall).  I picked Lindy up at work on Friday and we drove up to Milford, a drive that went surprisingly smoothly considering we were going during rush hour traffic (if not for getting turned around a bit when we got off the highway for gas and dinner at Edison, NJ, we would have made the trip in about four hours).  We got up there and Will and Rachel arrived moments later (Laura and Meg were coming up Saturday morning).  We enjoyed a wonderful evening toasting their engagement with some champagne and catching up.

The next morning, Will and I prepared breakfast (scrambled eggs, hash browns, chicken sausage and bacon) and the four of us enjoyed a lazy Saturday morning drinking coffee and enjoying the light snow that was falling.  Laura, Meg and Thiery (their dog) arrived at around noon, and after a bit of catching up (and letting Thiery swim in the ocean to tire him out), the six of us went for a wonderful walk on the beach.

That evening was when we had the real festivities planned.  We had a reservation at Mory's, which is a restaurant in New Haven that is a members only club which basically strives to be stuffy, old, and traditional Yale.  When you go there on certain Saturday nights, you're bound to be serenaded by an acapella group.  The tables are well worn wooden tables with years of Yalies carving their names into them, and gentlemen are still required to wear a sports coat and collared shirt to enter.  While the food is overpriced, what makes Mory's so special is the toasting sessions.

They will sell you a trophy cup filled with a mixture of different alcohols and juices that you order by the color.  We first ordered the Gold Cup (Champagne, Triple sec and Orange Juice).  The way the session works is when you have the cup, you make a toast and drink from the cup.  There are other rules as well: if you're holding the cup and someone tells a story about you, you must continue drinking until the story is finished, if someone sings a song while you're drinking from the cup you must continue drinking until the song is done, if you let the cup touch the table you buy the next cup and so on.  They're old Yale traditions, and enabled our girlfriends/fiances to hear all about our college glory (as well as some not so glorious moments).  We drank two cups, had a wonderful time, instilled in Rachel, Meg and Lindy some of our Yale traditions and then headed back to Milford for the night.

In the morning, we woke up, Will made some breakfast burritos and then Laura, Meg, Lindy and I set off for New Haven since Meg had never been given a proper Yale tour, we decided to oblige.  We also met up with one of Laura's college roommates, Laurel who is getting her Ph.D at Yale in Art History, so got to catch up with her as well.  We then returned to the beach house to do some grilling for lunch before heading back to our respective cities. 

Overall it was a wonderful weekend filled with great friends, regaling in old stories, and getting excited for some new beginnings.  Hopefully it's a tradition we'll continue each year.