You win some, you lose some Updated: February 5th, 2007 (RSS) It has been a long time since MeLisa and I have taken any kind of real vacation, and our stress meters have been off the scale lately. Between work, the house, the puppy and life in general... we have been going nonstop. We decided to take a long weekend and get away for some decompression time. On Friday we boarded the puppy and headed up to Philly for a couple of nights. We stayed at the Westin Hotel in downtown Philadelphia, which was awesome. I had read reviews about the hotel before making the reservation, so I was expecting it to be nice. I was not expecting an HDTV, or what might possibly be the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in. The location was great too... walking distance to just about everything we wanted to do, and the hotel itself was on top of a shopping mall, so there were plenty of places to eat and shop right near us. After checking in, we unpacked and got dressed for dinner. We hailed a cab, and made our way to Buddakan. The food was amazing, but the restaurant was very trendy... I am glad I made reservations in advance because there was a line out the door by the time we left. After dinner we stopped at the Ruby Tuesdays near our hotel for drinks and desert. As soon as we got seated in the restaurant, MeLisa and I made a run for the bathroom. When I came out of the men's room, a woman (who had just came out of the women's room) looked at me and said "there's no toilet paper left in the ladies room". I thought it was a strange way to start a conversation with an absolute stranger, but whaterver. "Ok..." I said as I looked at her, expecting a punchline. We both just stood there for a few seconds until it hit me... "Ooh! Um, you do realize that I don't work here, right?" The look on her face said otherwise. She did think I worked there... and after quickly scanning the room, I knew why. Buddakan has a "classy" dress code, so I was wearing a nice pair of black pants and a white dress shirt.... which just happened to be what every waiter at Ruby Tuesdays was wearing too. Doh. After drinks and desert, MeLisa and I headed back to the hotel and watched a little TV before having one of the best nights of sleep EVER. No joke, that bed was fantastic. You can actually buy the mattress, and it was so good MeLisa and I might do just that. We woke up Saturday and found a little bagel shop where we had breakfast. This is probably a good time to mention the hero of our trip: Google Maps: Mobile. I had loaded this software on my phone before we got there, and it was fantastic. We could get directions on the fly, or find restuarants or shops or whatever... wherever we were. It was kind of like having a GPS, but this GPS was smart enough to know the address and phone number of everything around us. One night we were sitting in a restaurant and we decided we wanted some ice cream, so I brought up Google Maps on my phone, did a search for "Ice Cream" near the restaurant we were at (it found 9) and then I clicked on the closest one to call them to make sure they were still open. Then I clicked the button to get directions from where we were and we walked over to get desert. How fucking cool is that!? If you want to see the application in action, check out this video of it running on the iPhone. After breakfast, we spent the rest of the morning shopping and then grabbed some cheesesteaks for lunch. We watched The Empire Strikes Back in the hotel room before heading back out for more shopping. It has become a tradition that we visit a bead store whenever we travel somewhere, and this trip was no exception. We took a cab over to Beadworks, where MeLisa bought copious amounts of beads. Strangely enough, I wasn't allowed to take a picture of MeLisa inside the store, because they were afraid of someone stealing their trade secrets. Apparently they haven't seen the bajillion other stores already set up exactly like this one. That night we hopped around between a few different bars before settling on one for dinner. After dinner and desert, we headed back to the hotel for another night of blissful sleep. The next morning we had breakfast in bed before packing to come home. On the way back to Baltimore, we stopped and had some sushi. It was a very nice weekend, and I was feeling very de-stressed and happy. ...and then we got home. It seems that we left the upstairs shower running just a weeeee little bit while we were gone. Wouldn't have been a big deal, except that the water managed to find some crack in the seal around the shower and it ended up eating its way through the floor... and into the living room below it. Thankfully, we got a plumber to come out pretty quickly and fix the problem (which wasn't a big deal... just needed to seal up the showerhead and a couple of spots in the shower itself). We'll have to patch and repaint the ceiling next weekend, but it certainly could have been worse. All in all though, it was a great weekend. Ate some amazing food, did some shopping and got a lot of much needed rest.