Left the house and were sitting in the van at 8:33 this morning, half hour past our hoped for departure time. I started the new page of the log book and the Jedi turned the key in the ignition....and nothing. So, the Jedi got out and took the opportunity to teach the Young Chef how to hook up jumper cables. I did not photograph this process. I like my men folk, and I want them to continue to like me.
We were actually on the road by 8:53, and then had to turn around to get our phone chargers. (Sweetling's sunglasses and blanket and my scrapbooking pen had already been forgotten and retrieved during the van jumping process.)
The Young Chef was asleep before we even hit the highway. The Jedi and I played the license plate game by ourselves for a while and I read aloud the logs of all the past trips.
Young Chef woke up around 12:33 and dug into one of his bags of flaming hot Cheetos. The Jedi and I have a secret pool going on how long his 4 bags of Cheetos will last during this trip. I got him 6 small bags of Cheetos for the trip on Monday, and those were gone before Thursdays. Because, he said, "They were so small...."
We had plans for the evening in Syracuse, so we decided to get our lunch from Briquettes Smokehouse in Ashtubula to go. I know I just misspelled that, but I'm not arguing with my tablet to try to open a new tab to look it up. My tablet and I are not on the best of terms. It is not my favorite piece of electronics. Lunch was good. The kids each got a perch sandwich, which were good, but the Young Chef felt that the breading to fish ratio was too skewed towards the breading. The Jedi and I split some ribs and briskets. The ribs had a nice dry rub on them. The brisket was all right, but not super exciting. In the parking lot, right next to the river and the harbor, we saw this giant thing. I asked friends on facebook about it, who guessed that it was a conveyor belt to move gravel from one side of the river to the other (where it was mounded up in large hills.) Still unclear as to the *why* of said process.
We stopped by an ice cream/ diner in Erie PA to recreate a photo of the kids from our trip to Buffalo in 2009. We knew in advance the ice cream stand had closed for the season, we missed eating there by just a few days. But we discovered when we got there that they had either put away, or no longer had, all the large kitchy "Americana" style statues that we so fondly remembered. We took a photo of the kids on one of the outdoor patio table that hadn't yet been packed up. The railroad crossing sign was one of the few details that we could find to recreate an earlier photo.
We were still well behind schedule, so we skipped the planned ice cream stop. Even so it was after 8 before we got to Syracuse. (The Jedi pointed out the irony of how on the first trip Buffalo was this distant location that we spend two days driving to get to, and on this trip, we were just blowing by it on our first day of our trip.) The morning delay wasn't enough to account for the late arrival, and we hadn't hit any traffic, so there seemed to be no explanation to what happened. We had just driven all day long, and none of our stops had gone as planned :(
Dinner was at Eva's Polish Restaurant, and that was very good. The sauerkraut smell was a little off putting, but the decor was nice and the food was filling. We ordered desserts to go and went to the hotel, skipping the family fun night we had been planning. At the hotel, everyone was tired. Instead of desserts and movie, it turned out to be desserts and bed.
Things we saw on the drive:
--gravel conveyor bridge over river in Ashtubula (I swear every time I type that city's name the spelling gets worse.)
--6 or so deer grazing at the side of the highway, not all in one herd, but one or two here and there along the drive
--a white heron over a pond
--4 or 5 buffalo statues on exit ramp berm
--"text" stops on the turnpike
--didn't see it, but the prepaid ezpass let us use the express lanes when going through the turnpike toll booths
Hoping that tomorrow is a better day. Today was just not the awesome start to the trip we were hoping for.
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