Geoffrey H Wood

Almost 11 months ago, my wife and I both quit our jobs in Indianapolis and moved to Des Moines. She was set to start classes at Drake Law but I wasn't quite sure how I would spend my time. Looking back, it's been a great year.

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David Hauser of Grasshopper opens up Big Omaha 2010. Photo by Malone & Co.Wow. Big Omaha was absolutely everything I expected and more. For those that don't know, Big Omaha is an entrepreneurial event put on by Silicon Prairie News in, well, Omaha. The idea is to bring together a bunch of entrepreneurially-minded folks excited about what they are doing and what they will do. Add in a bunch of speakers from across the country who have done exciting and inspiring things to generate discussion. Finish with a completely immersive, branded experience and you have Big Omaha.

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Image from marcp_dmoz on Flickr

I'm now five days into my no meat experiment and I have three initial observations:

1. Some restaurants make great no meat food

I was worried that it would be hard to find food that I liked that didn't contain sausage, bacon or at the very least, chicken. However, on Saturday we watched the England/France Rugby match from Fado in Washington, DC, and had the Veggie Boxty Quesadilla and the Tomato Mozzarella Potato Bread and both were awesome. I don't know if flavors are more noticeable without meat of if the food was really that superior but these two dishes are my favorites, so far.

2. McDonald's is out

We're big fans of the McDonald's drive through while on vacation (and sometimes nights when we just don't want to cook). However, we tried to stop on the way back from our trip and I was disappointed to see that other than salads, there is not a single no meat option on their menu. It's probably a good thing for overall health, anyway, that we'll have to remove them from our list.

3. There a zillion types of vegetables

We picked out a few no meat recipes and I headed out to Hy-Vee to pick up the ingredients. I had never paid a lot of attention to vegetables before so little did I know that there is a multitude of types of potatoes, two types of parsley, about 8 derivations of portabello mushrooms, several types of carrots, that green onions and scallions are the same thing, etc. Unfortunately, we'll have to be more specific in grocery list crafting in the future.

In about an hour I'm headed out to Omaha to meetup with the other gents from Silicon Prairie News. We fly out from Eppley first thing in the morning en route to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest Interactive 2010 (SxSW).

I'm very excited to get the opportunity to participate in this year's event and plan on blogging as I get the chance down there. The Silicon Prairie News crew has a lot of stuff in the works so it should be a good time. I'm particularly excited for the Silicon Prairie Party (hosted by Big Omaha) that should be a great forum to network with other Midwesterners as well as show off some of the great things we have here to people from all over the world.

SxSW is sometimes called "Spring Break for Nerds" and it's fitting that this trip to Texas is almost 10 years to the day from my last Spring Break (also to Texas - South Padre Island). There's a history of new technologies debuting a SxSW, such as Twitter in 2007 and Foursquare in 2009. We don't know what the 2010 event will bring but one technology, Uppward, built by four of Des Moines technologists, launched today!

Image from EclecticBlogs on Flickr

As I wrote in my last post, we’re heading to Washington DC next month. This trek is an annual event for us and part of the tradition includes a tour around the city on the famed trolleys of Old Town Trolley Tours. The “trolley tour” (as we simply call it) is one of our favorite parts of visiting Washington and we recommend it to friends, family, and pretty much anyone who mentions an upcoming visit that direction.

We took our first trolley tour in 2004 when a friend of my wife’s recommended it. Her advice was that since there is so much to see in Washington the only way to see it all is to take a guided trolley tour. She suggested we do it first so that we get an overview of all the sites as well as the opportunity to scout out the places that we wanted to visit in person later on the trip. We took her advice and enjoyed it so much that we took a second tour on that first trip, this time viewing the monuments in particular by moonlight.

To clarify, Old Town Trolley Tours has a “hop-on, hop-off” model so you can ride the trolley between locations as well. However, we prefer to do the entire loop all at once. It takes a little while but we love listening to the live tour guides who narrate the tour with historical fact and personal anecdotes. Many of them are quite amusing, to boot.

There are several tours in Washington so make sure you choose Old Town Trolley. Our experiences with them have inspired us to take tours in other cities we visit, as well. Specifically, we’ve done the tours in London and Bath in the UK, Dublin, Ireland, and Rome, Italy. Each was with a different tour company and Old Town Trolley in Washington was the best, though the Big Bus Company of London is a close second thanks to the dry humor of the Brit tour guides.

If you’re headed to Washington and ready to take my advice, here are a couple things to note: 

1. Buy your tickets online ahead of time. The tour is tremendously valuable but the tickets are not cheap. If you buy online you get a discount. Buy tickets here.
2. If you’re visiting friends who live in Washington, have them sign up for the Hometown Pass. Residents within 50 miles of Washington can register for a free tour pass! So long as they’re riding with a paid-tour guest (you, the visitor) they get to ride for free (brilliant marketing). Register here.

Enjoy your trip!

We’re thinking about making the annual trek to Washington, DC next month. Our five year anniversary falls right about the same time as my wife’s first Law School spring break. Since a trip to Ireland (where we were married) isn’t in the cards this year, we might as well head to Washington (where we were engaged).

It’s about time that we get to Washington; from 2004-2008 we went at least once a year and several times twice. We love the city and have so many friends and family in the area that we always have a great time. 2009 proved to be too busy of a year (we had a baby, I finished grad school, my wife started law school, we moved 500 miles west, etc) to make the trip and March seems like a good time to rectify that for 2010.

This trip will be our first chance to introduce Graham to one of our favorite cities and it’s fitting that this will probably become a “Tour de Baby”. Our hope is to get a chance to meet Esaia in person. Esaia is the son of my cousin David and his wife Katrina, who was born a few weeks after Graham. We also hope to meet Alexander, the son of our friends Nick and Kate who greeted the world at almost exactly the same time. Finally, we hope to get the chance to see Bri and Dave as well as Bronk and Jess, two sets of our DC-area friends who are currently expecting.

Dinner with Dave & Katrina on one of our 2008 DC trips. Neither of us knew it but both Hope and Katrina were pregnant in this pic.

In addition to the baby tour, we’ll hit up another Smithsonian Museum (we pick a different one every trip) and, as always, we’ll make sure and book as much time as possible with our stalwart DC hosts and good friends Matt and Jane. Also, the three of us will get our first chance to visit my grandfather's grave at Arlington National Cemetery. I made a solo trip in December 2008 for his burial but I'm looking forward to making the visit as a family.

As we were packing up last week and getting ready for one last, great trip across the I-States(1) we started brainstorming a list of things we're looking forward to in Tall Corn State: