Beau & Jen, Charleston, Litchfield2016

Three Fridays ago I tricked Kelsey into getting on a plane again and we flew to Palm Beach.  The humidity was such that my glasses would fog up, blinding me, every time I took a step outside. It was for a good cause, though, because Beau and Jen got married!

And I got to give Beau away. That's how this works, right?

It rained a bit before the wedding, but then cleared up and was a perfect (super humid) night.

And the Flagler Museum made the reception very classy.

Kels and I clean up alright, too.

Beau and I have known each other for fifteen years as this September, and I was delighted and terrified to serve as his best man.  I had a lot of good memories to mine for my speech, some of which I am sure were corrupted by time and had nothing to do with anything that actually happened. 

The next morning, I tricked Kels again and we got on another plane to Charleston. We wandered around for hours, Kels bought a hat, we ate oysters three different ways, and found an ice-cream sandwich shop staffed by a classically trained trumpet player (who also makes surprisingly good ice cream sandwiches). 

Then we watched Hamilton win all the awards.

On Monday we drove up to Litchfield, where I had a special surprise for some folks at the beach...

Ben! All the way from Japan!

After I found out that Ben could come, we went to extreme lengths to make sure that no one else would find out.  

**BREAK**

At this point in the blog, Kelsey is taking over due to Mike recovering from his eye surgery. He's doing well, he just can't look at computer screens:) Anyway, where were we? Oh, yeah....I can't believe Mike kept the secret of Ben joining us for several months. Apparently this is something he was working out while we were on our Europe trip. I'm so grateful Ben was able to the beach (this gives us hope for next year too!) and the quality of our hangout time and cocktails benefited from his presence.

Our first night, Ween and Roberta were visiting for an evening and took everyone out for a seafood dinner! Glad we ended up getting a picture of the whole group:) Jen, Ross, and Brian had yet to arrive at the beach. They would join on Thursday after I was already gone.

Our waitress had great picture-taking skills.

And I made Mike practice his photography skills with our fancy camera. Here's an example.

Ben making cocktails back at the house on our first night. He should be on a cocktail edition of Top Chef.

The group waiting for dinner at one of the traditional spots: The Fish House.

I was no longer at the beach when this photo was taken, but I definitely cried when I saw it. Apparently where the future Paljug child is expected to swing.  (Mike edit: this picture was 100% calculated to make Kelsey cry.  There was no other reason for it.)

Sunset on the first evening

Great picture of pregnant Kay

**BREAK**

At this point it has been five days since Mike's eye surgery and so I (Mike) am taking back over to finish this blog.  Everything is very blurry, but I can sort of/kind of see.  Any errors on the blog for the next several months will be blamed on my PRK procedure and the slow process of the top layer of my eye growing back and smoothing itself out.