Travel

 Recently I came across an interesting post about Niagara Falls and it started me thinking about what makes a vacation.

Not long ago Mike and I returned from a “vacation” in Atlanta, GA. We chose Atlanta because our daughter is teaching there this semester and visiting her was as good an excuse as any to visit a new city.

Unfortunately the trip started falling apart on our first full day there when Mike tested positive for Covid-19. I continued my adventures in Atlanta, including a mini-seder with our daughter, for another two days until I, too, tested positive.

Oh well. There are still pleasant memories if you get rid of the part where Mike and I holed up in our AirBnb for several days.

Batya and I visited the Coca Cola museum and, after learning all about the history of the fizzy beverage, tasted a variety of flavors from other countries. We also spent a more serious few hours at the Center for Civil Rights. While she worked I wandered her neighborhood, checking out a rail trail and her local yarn store and just generally getting the flavor of her area. I also wandered a bit by her work neighborhood but got stymied on my indoor plans. Note to self: try to avoid traveling on the Easter Sunday weekend if you want to see indoor stuff. It will either be closed or booked solid. 

But back to the point of this post. 

Prior to the kids going off to college, travel was a family affair. We’d search out places that we thought would be interesting to both Mike and I, as adults, and the kids, as … kids.

Our travels tended to be car trips which included Montreal,Quebec, Cooperstown, NY and, still an annual favorite, Lancaster, PA.

One memorable summer we cycled the length of the Erie Canal from Niagara Falls, ON to Albany, NY. 

Once the kids were in college, Mike and I rediscovered the pleasures of traveling together, just the two of us. Until recently our official vacation trips were still confined to road trips but we also tacked on vacation days to conference trips. Through conferences we’ve had the pleasure of visiting Baltimore,MD,  Omaha, NE, Phoenix, AZ and, most recently, Toronto, ON. We spend a day or so together packing in the “must sees” and then, while Mike attends the conference, I experience the area alone and at my own pace.

We’ve wandered streets and sought out experiences. The Desert Botanical Gardens, La Jolla, Letchworth State Park, Fort Niagara, dinner at a culinary school, hikes, local ciders. All snapshots of time spent together, etched in our memories.

Gone (mostly) are the memories of the travel glitches and left are the smiles as we think about time together experiencing new places.

As we slowly venture into this new part of our lives we are looking to gather many more memories. Feel free to pop your suggestions in the comments, either here or back on your favorite social media platform.

Devorah

Pittsburgh!

Following our adventure on the Great Allegheny Trail, we spent the weekend in Pittsburgh with my brother and his lovely wife.

They took us all over town and we sampled much of what Steel City has to offer, starting with a visit to the Heinz History Center. (Yes, they have a display of ketchup, why do you ask?)
(Interestingly enough, the new Heinz ketchup pin that Little Squid is sport on his hat did not come from here but was given to him a week later at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strausburg. Heinz has a lot of history with the railroads, including special cars to ship their products.)

We wandered around the museum for quite a while and hit what my brother considers to be the high point, an exhibit which explains the "Pittsburgh" dialect. Very educational.
Moving on, we strolled the Strip, discovering that Nothing happened in one location,

and having great fried fish in another (no, not at this church).
We finished it up with an over the top dinner for Josh's Birthday. (I was mostly off line for the entire trip, hence not birthday post for my youngest brother.) Don't they look cute!
Taking the dog for a walk, in an attempt to tire him and Little Squid out, we passed a street devoted to garages. I kid you not. It was not a back alley but a real street type street but all the houses fronted on other streets with their garages on this one.
As you can see, the tiring walk only lasted for so long ...
On the last day of our visit we got a tour of Carnegie Mellon University with it's Sky Walk
and painted fence. Apparently the paint is rarely dry on this fence, students keep repainting it. It used to be much thinner ...
CMU has sculpture scattered randomly around the campus. Little Squid particularly liked this one. It made him feel cool on a 90 degree day.
Then, off to the University of Pittsburg's Cathedral of Learning with its historically themed classrooms.





These are supposed to be true-to-life recreations of classrooms in other countries at other times but I suspect that the desktops were added for the convenience of the students who take classes in these rooms. Yes, they are really used for classes.









Josh's favorite is the Israel room with its white board hidden behind the mosaics below.


The common room. Can you imagine this full of students?

After visiting all of the open historical rooms we hiked back, had some lunch and hit the road. More adventures have followed and I promise to share some of them with you soon.

A Taste of Lancaster

A few days ago we made our annual pilgrimage to Lancaster, PA. This year, for the first time in three years, we camped out.

The tent is brand new, having discarded our two older (and smaller) tents during the great b*d bug debacle of 2007. Two of our sleeping bags are also brand new as the kids have outgrown the child-sized ones that they used to use.

Squidette was put in charge of erecting the tent with Little Squid assigned to assist while I started a fire. Experience has shown that if we do not start a fire by 5 or so then we will not eat until really late. (Mike was unloading the car and doing a small amount of unwinding after a nerve wracking drive through some really nasty rain.)

They did a great job until it came time to raise the roof. At that point the stronger (and taller) adults had to step in and help. We also had to put the fly on as neither child has the height or jumping ability to get it over the top of the tent.
Yes, it is huge but it served well and we were all as comfortable as one can get in a tent on a hill.

Little Squid woke up each morning in a heap at the bottom of the tent. The rest of us managed to mostly maintain our positions on our mats but he and I had the more slippery sleeping bags and with his lower mass, he had a lesser ability to stick to the slanted surface.

After a dinner of locally made / grown, slightly undercooked, sausage, corn on the cob and (fully cooked) bread,--and s'mores for desert, we sat around our pitiful fire and knit / read. A quiet and companionable evening as we listened to guitar music coming from a neighboring campsite.

The next day we trooped off to a local corn maze for another annual tradition and got ourselves good and lost and then found again as we wended our way through the maize.
I got a good amount done on this year's Corn Maze sock.
A hefty lunch at Good and Plenty (another tradition), some shopping and then back to the campground to swim and just hang out for the afternoon. We did not even attempt a fire until after dinner, dining instead, on cold (cooked) sausages, fruit and bread, all obtained from a local market. Yum! Then, we finally lit the fire and sat around trying to think of campfire songs and instead singing all sorts of silly stuff.

Our neighbors, they of the guitar music (which I realized was recorded) stayed up way beyond our bedtime, chatting loudly. I couldn't really fault them, they did turn off the music at 10 (the campgrounds quiet time) but it started the night off badly for all of us and not one of us slept well.

Waking by 6:30 (habits are hard to break, especially when you haven't slept well to begin with), we breakfasted, read, and stared in awe at the incredibly dense fog that obscured our view of the cornfield just 100 yards away.

Once the fog had lifted a bit, we went off to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania. We've been here once or twice before and really like looking at the old trains. It was their family weekend so they had some retired engineers there to explain some of the engines to us. After a full two hours we pulled ourselves away and went to Jakey's for lunch. It was our first time dining there but not our last! Mike, Squidette and I all had bar-b-que sandwiches of one sort or another--Little Squid was less adventurous and had a hamburger.

A trip to That Fish Place, That Pet Place then ensued with the acquisition of lots of food and supplies for our turtles-in-residence and for Little Squid's soon-to-be blue tongued skink. Then a "quick" round of mini-golf at a new-to-us place (with a good amount of shade!) and back to the campground for more swimming / reading / relaxing.

Our final campfire was more successful than our first two and we managed to successfully brown our corn and smoked sausages which were eaten with fresh cantalope and more local bread. Mmm ... whoopie pies finished up the meal. Sitting around the fire we passed around my BeBook with it's collection of books and read a variety of selections from Grimm's Fairy Tales. Mike started a story from Arabian Nights (on his Nokia tablet) and we laughed and joked and generally enjoyed each others company.

All of us slept much better--probably because we were so very tired from two nights of little sleep--and were abruptly awoken by our neighbors noisily rising at 5:00 a.m. Grr ...

I managed to fall back to sleep and the kids didn't hear them but Mike was up for the day at that point and woke me up when he finally decided to start packing.

And so we are now home, though not at the end of our summer travels. I know I promised you Pittsburgh and, of course, there is all the knitting that always happens while we travel. Please be patient, I will get to all in good time.

Start of Summer

For Mike and the kids, this weekend was the start of summer vacation. My summer officially starts on Wednesday, kind of, sort of.

To celebrate the start of vacation, I started the weekend by picking up my new BeBook from the FedEx drop off site.

(Shown with the road atlas for size.)

It came loaded with 150 classics and, after an hour or so of patient fiddling (during which came a point where I almost returned it), I figured out how to read library ebooks on it. That means that I can load trashy novels on it in addition to those mind expanding classics.

I also figured out how to format pattern PDFs and other pattern types so that I can load knitting patterns on it and be able to actually read them.

We did other things this weekend, besides play with my new toy. On saturday we found a geocache that had been eluding us (we have now found over 100 caches thanks to Little Squid and friend) and on Sunday we took an, unintentionally, long walk and then went kayaking in the Hudson River, right here in Manhattan.

No pictures of the kayaking because I did not bring my camera -- didn't want it to get wet.

The road atlas is out because we are trying to figure out our vacation route for this summer. With labor day being late, we get almost all of August for a change -- a full extra week! Possible destinations include: the ever popular Lancaster, PA, the newly popular but still unvisisted Pittsburgh, PA and possibly Toronto, Canada.

For now, however, it is time to put on some sunblock and pedal off to work. Mike will schlep the kids to camp later and we will all reconvene somewhere around dinner time.

Ahh summer!

Squid on Wheels -- International Edition -- The Food

As you well know, we squid take our food very seriously. While traveling, we do our best to partake of local cuisine. We even go to the extreme of trying to track down good local food on the road.

Our first food foray of the trip was to the Main Street Ice Cream Parlor in Chestertown, New York.Wonderful food in a homey setting. We did not indulge in ice cream since we wanted to get back on the road fairly quickly.

On our first full day in Montreal, we did quite a bit of biking and needed to refuel before our attempt on Mount Royal. Serious exercise calls for serious food, in this case smoked meat sandwiches from Schwartz's Deli.

We did take out and dined al fresco at the base of Mount Royal.

And then comes the question -- why does one climb a mountain? The answer, supplied by my husband, "for the ice cream of course!" No pictures of that indulgence. We ate while walking back up to the peak because Little Squid and I felt that the point of riding a bike up the mountain was to get to the peak -- which Mike bypassed after toping out on the trail just meters below the peak. Silly us, we followed. Do'h! We then had to reascend about half a kilometer to get to the actual summit.

Lunch the next day was at a diner and included a plate of poutine. That's french fries covered in gravy and cheese curd to you Americans. It was surprisingly addicting. I guess I shouldn't be so surprised since there was a serious poutine following before we joined the bandwagon. I just didn't expect to really, really like it!

Dinners were fantastic though not photographed. We had lots of French, some Polish and some touristy food, including crepes and fondue in Quebec City.

A little chocolate fondue to end the meal

Midday snacks were plentiful and consisted mostly of ice cream,

Maple Ice Cream!!! With maple sugar bits in it!!!

but had the occasional local specialty thrown in to mix it up. (No picture of the maple coronets consumed in Quebec City.) Keep in mind that the maple ice cream was local, so it counts.
And once we reached New Hampshire ... there were blackberries!

Blog Vacation

We interrupt this blog vacation to bring you this.

We Squid would also like to wish a very Happy Birthday to Lil' Bro, Josh. It's a little belated but I did call ... Josh, from all of us here in the Squid home, may this year be as wonderful as the last and may your new home suit you and Jaye to a T. Love you!

We now resume this blog vacation.

ReEntry

So you do not have to read blathering about our boring activities (dentist, doctor, back to school shopping etc) I give you some more vacation photos. Be sure to click for bigger on the roller coaster photos if you want a good look at my face. It is really worth a look. If you want to read the blathering that gives this post it's title, then scroll down past the pictures.

Executioner Sheep

The Big Cheese

Cool thing in Cincinatti

Cool thing in Indiana

Close up of Cool Thing in Indiana

Mama Squid and Squidette enjoying (?) a Roller Coaster

Sheer Terror

A Nice Photo of Squidette on Her Bike

Reentry is always tough and it was made tougher this week by rotten weather. We did lots of boring back-to-school shopping where in we discovered that Squidette has added flesh/muscle to certain body parts moving her pant status from slim-with-button-elastic to regular-with-button-elastic. (Yes the regulars are still a bit roomy even with the addition.) It also revealed that young ladies are expected to jump from size 14 kids to size 0 womens. Gulp! Got to love a naive kid -- she was looking for 0-slim with button elastic!

Little Squid was easier to fit now that Old Navy has decided that there are slim size 10 kids. I think my complaints on his sister's behalf may have had an impact. Yea, right.

And lastly, my dentist must have heard that my union settled with the city. He has found a way to spend my extra income. Squidette and I both have to go back for more work -- redo of an old, worn out filling for me, sealant and maybe cavity for her. Figures.

Today we may try to do something fun and then Squidette and I will tackle my back to school shopping. Oh joy. Did I mention that I go back to work on Monday? And that I spent a good deal of time on the phone, working, yesterday? It's o.k., I'll take the time back when we do the middle school tours with Little Squid.

Tomorrow -- we plan to circumnavigate Manhattan as a family. I promise photos this time.

Trip Knitting

Yes, there was knitting on the trip. Non-stop on the drives west and east and intermittent while visiting.

Finished was this baby sweater -- still in need of blocking and sewing up. The sleeves were knit twice. My goal was to finish it before reaching Kentucky (the back and one front were done before heading west). By the time we reached Columbus, OH, I had finished knitting the sleeves (for the first time) and started sewing up. About half an hour later I realized that there was no way the sleeves would fit the sleeve cap despite measuring up correctly so I abandoned the job and worked on socks for a little bit. When we reached Kentucky I took a quick look at the intended sweater recipient and decided that the whole thing would be too small, so the sweater slept for the rest of the visit. I did, however, whip up a quick pair of socks for the big-little lady which joined the socks I gifted to her parents. (The parental socks were knit well before the trip.)

Miss E's socks

Socks for Mike's brother, his wife and daughter.

At the end of the visit I finally got the sweater draped over Miss E and decided that it was not a lost cause. The sleeves were reknit from Indianapolis to Wheeling to a bit east of Harrisburg, PA where they were finally finished. I think they will fit now but will leave the finishing until later today.

On the sock front, I had a pair of Monkey socks in a close-to-complete state and slated to be gifted to my newest sister-in-law. Those got picked up for completion on the trip from Kentucky to Indiana and I am proud to say, were finished in time for gift-giving that evening. Both brother and sister-in-law found them cozy and comfy. Yea!

Socks for J & JSocks for another, currently unnamed in-law

... and his wife.

***

While in Indianapolis I helped my sister-in-law remember how to knit. Does anyone out that way have a favorite yarn store to recommend? One where the staff is really nice to newbies? I left her with the Knitter's shop guide but that doesn't tell you which shops are nice to people and which turn up their noses and tell you that you are knitting the wrong way. Helen? Ann? You guys are the closest to IN that I know of ... maybe you know something?

I also left my brother with firm instructions to totally enable her. Tee Hee! He doesn't know what he is in for ...

***

Early this morning our next door neighbor brought by the packages that had arrived while we were away. Imagine my joy and amazement when I found all of this from Isabelle!

The ball shaped things are tea flowers. The clothes are lovely and I think I once made a sweater out of the yarn that the potholder is made of. Squidette is so enamored of the bag that I may have to give it to her. Thank you so much!!!