Enterprise Car Rental had a Honda Civic, which would have been great except for the fact that it was a two door. They gave us a free upgrade to a Ford Fusion. It was a very nice car with Satellite Radio and Voice Commands. When I plugged my iPod into the USB connection it started playing the audio book I was listening to right through the speakers. Unfortunately when I switched to something else it wouldn't play at all. I had to use an auxiliary plug through the headphone jack to listen to it. The Bluetooth paired with my iPhone but turned off the voice on the GPS program. The whole voice control system was powered by Microsoft, which I guess explains why it worked so poorly. The only thing it ever said, after I connected the phone was "your phone is connected but you haven't enabled the 911 function". I did look at the manual, but it was too complicated and pretty stupid. The climate control had a million buttons and they were so small, it made them very hard to see. When I got back into my car I appreciated the simple, 3 button interface, with large graphics.
We drove out to Long Island and were starving. My Sister had recommended a Chinese Restaurant that we found and ate at. It was marvelous. I miss bowls of crispy noodles and duck sauce on the table. NY is the only place I've seen that.
We had a great dinner with my Sister and a dear childhood friend of ours. We had Lobster Bakes with lobster, clams and mussels.
In the morning we drove to the neighborhood I grew up in, Flushing, Queens. I parked on the street but when we went to the bus stop I found that the bus I used to ride only had a route during rush hour. We drove a few miles to another route and got a bus into Main Street, Flushing. The bus was full by the time we got to the Subway and we were the only Caucasians on it.
We rode the Subway into Times Square. Then took the 8th Avenue train down to 14th Street. We were going to this High Line Park that was on some old elevated railroad tracks. We got out of the train and I looked around for some street vendors hoping to get a couple of cheap umbrellas. There were none. We walked around the block, but then I turned around and went into a CVS Pharmacy and we got a couple of small, folding umbrellas. By the time we left the store it was pouring. So we stood under an awning and called a friend we were going to meet later. She suggested that we go to Chelsea Market, which was a block away.
Good choice. We spend an hour or two admiring some amazing food and stores in an old warehouse that had been converted into an indoor market, very upscale and interesting. We walked from there up to Macy's in Herald Square. Although I felt like having deli for lunch we didn't find one on our walk. There was a Coffee Shop right across the street. It started raining hard again and we were lucky to get two counter seats. We had a marvelous turkey club sandwich that we split with some coffee.
Joan shopped in Macy's for a while and then we walked up Broadway and met my old friend. The three of us walked up through Times Square and got our picture snapped and posted on one of the huge screens there. We had a laugh over that.
We met my Sister and her Husband and had an excellent Italian dinner. Then we walked over to the Neil Simon Theater for "Jesus Christ Superstar". I had seen it in the 70s when it first came out and hadn't been familiar with the music back then. I know it very well now. The play was fabulous. Besides one short song, I knew every lyric and most of the music by heart. It was done as only a Broadway play can be done. We saw the spit fly out of "Jesus'" mouth during one of the songs. We all loved it.
A long wait at a poorly managed parking lot didn't dampen my spirit. My Brother-in-Law drove us back to my car in Queens and we followed back to the house in Long Island for a good nights sleep.
On Friday my Sister took the day off and we went shopping at an amazing DSW. We all got shoes and had an amazing lunch at Ben's Deli. The half sandwich/soup special came with a huge bowl of soup. None of us could finish our half sandwiches of pastrami, corned beef, barley or chicken noodle with matzoh ball soup.
We had dinner at great little seafood restaurant. Joan and I split a 2 lb. lobster that was out of this world.
When we got up, we packed, ate our left-over deli, said good bye, then got on the road. Traffic was pretty bad trying to get on the Bronx River Parkway and it took at least a half hour or more to pass an accident by the Zoo.
After the Tappan Zee Bridge, signs warned of long delays on the NYS Thruway, so I took the Palisades Parkway hoping to avoid the traffic. Went to Bear Mountain and my iPhone lost it's signal there (which meant no GPS). When I went over the bridge I asked directions. I had to turn around and when I got to the traffic circle that would take me back to the Thruway, it was stopped dead. I turned around again.
We stopped in a little town but couldn't find a map. I stayed on 9W North and ended up in Newburgh. From there it wasn't hard to get onto 84 and the Route 17. We got off to go to a camp reunion at the camp I attended in the Catskills back in the 60's. There was no sign at the exit and I went the wrong way for about 4 miles before I used my phone to see the mistake. Turned around and made it to the camp pretty easily.
We walked up the hill and visited with quite a few old friends, many who I hadn't seen in 45 years. One guy, who'd been my counselor the second year told Joan I had been the worst camper in the history of the camp. One of the older counselors was really nice and warm and we talked to him more than anyone.
We nibbled on burgers and then walked around the grounds a bit. The camp was getting pretty run down. It had been closed for a few years after being rented to some Hasidics for a short time. Sad to see it so, but it's a bygone era. I found it hard to visualize modern young kids enjoying a place like that. It seems to me they'd want A/C and WiFi today. Not the beautiful outdoor Summers in the Catskills.
We left the camp and drove through Wurtsboro and Ellenville towards Kingston and then Albany. Our dear friends who had just gotten home from almost a full day traveling back from Alaska called and told us that we were welcome to stay with them in Albany, but that we'd have to entertain ourselves as they were half dead from the travel. We really didn't want to impose, but enjoy their company so much that we agreed (we don't mind Motels at all, but it's really more fun to stay with friends).
We stopped at a diner in Kingston for dinner. We decided to split a dinner, which was a really good idea. We couldn't come close to finishing our own halves of salad, meat loaf, baked potato and chocolate pudding.
We got up to Albany with no problems and settled into the very comfortable room at our friends very nice home. We went to bed early and had a good sleep. In the morning we had a good breakfast at a diner on Western Avenue. Then we walked around Crossgates Mall a little and I showed Joan around so she could go there on her own.
I met my Stepson and played tennis on the great clay courts at his club. I played terrible and lost two sets which we enjoyed anyway. We showered and he, his daughter and I went back to our friends where we met Joan. He decided to go home and got directions to the place we were going to on Warner's Lake. Joan and I went back to Crossgates and had a light lunch at a pretty good healthy cafe.
We drove up to Warner's Lake. Another old friend has a beautiful camp cabin on that pretty lake. We hung out, visited with many other old friends and had a very nice dinner that one of the guys grilled. We went back to the house we were staying at reasonably early, soon after it got dark and again, went to bed pretty
early.
In the morning we were to meet yet another friend for breakfast near the house. Surprisingly, he didn't show. We had a nice breakfast and Joan dropped me at my stepson's tennis club. She went to Tawasentha Park to do some hiking and jogging. It turned out all the clay courts were booked so rather than pay $24 to play indoors, we drove to Union College. It appeared that their courts were locked so we drove to a little park in Scotia. Interestingly there were a bunch of people playing Pickle Ball, which I'd never seen before. It's played on a much smaller court, painted on the tennis courts, with short hard paddles and a Wiffle type ball. We got a court and played a nice match. The Pickle Ball lines were a little confusing, but we got used to them. I blew him away the first set. He blew me away the second set. We played a short third set which he won, but we both enjoyed the good quality of play and sportsmanship.
He took me back to the club. We showered and he dropped me off. We drove up to Round Lake where we met with some dear ex-neighbors. We walked around that beautiful village and had a little bite for lunch that she was nice enough to prepare. We visited for a couple of hours and then headed to farm out in Guilderland that the friends we were staying with Mother lived on. An old exchange student of theirs from Italy was in town and they must have had 30-35 people there for a fabulous Thanksgiving style dinner. The whole afternoon was magical. We visited with old friends and made some new ones. The meal was great!
We didn't stay too late. When the dinner broke up we helped as much as we could (which wasn't too much, the people who put this on knew what they were doing). We visited with our friends for a little while and went to be pretty early as usual.
One of our friends was going to work in the morning, the other had some errands. We packed up the car and started towards NYC and JFK airport where we had a 5:00 pm flight back to Austin. We had most of the day to kill and I figured getting to the airport at 3:00 would give us at least a half hour to wait for boarding. We stopped at a McDonald's as soon as we got onto the Thruway and split an Egg McMuffin with coffees.
Then we stopped at this nice little bakery in Kingston an hour or so later and had a really good breakfast of waffles, eggs and sausage. I've gotten into the habit of eating breakfast at this bakery, Dieslings, in Kingston, whenever I'm passing that way and they do have really nice food.
We next stopped at a big mall in Westchester. Joan shopped in Macy's for a while. We had a couple of lousy smoothies from a surely jerk at "Mr. Smoothie". Possibly the worst we've ever had, we both threw them out after a few sips. Finally we got back on the highway for the final leg of our drive.
We stopped for gas near the airport, in a neighborhood I wasn't familiar with, off the belt parkway. Had to ride parallel with the highway before we could get back on, but made it to Enterprise and dropped the car off in a jiffy. I really like that company, they seem to try harder. We road a shuttle to the Airtrain and took that right to the terminal.
American Airlines terminal was a mess. Rather than having everyone in line for the next agent they had agents at stations scattered all over the place. We got self-serve boarding passes and paid to check our one bag, but then had to wait 20 minutes to get a tag for the bag, so we could take it to the carousel.
When we walked over to security, it was a little scary. The lines were very long. Nothing to do but get on the back of one though. It moved faster than you'd think and we were finally in after about a half hour. Then quite a long walk to our gate. We stopped at a kiosk and got two vegetarian chicken salad sandwiches, two cookies, some candy and drinks. By the time we got to the gate, we just got right onto the boarding line and got our seats. We had cut it much closer than we planned and if there had been any traffic on the way, we might have missed the flight. My Sister told me that they give NY airport 3 hours, not 2 and I can see why. We'll know next time.
A woman moved to the seat in front of and across the aisle from me, with a 10 month old and I groaned mentally. As it turned out, the little girl was very taken with me and kept on looking at me and breaking into a huge smile every time I looked at her. Adorable little kid. We watched a movie on the iPhone and the flight got in 20 minutes early. Although the sandwiches sucked, we ate both, although we took the huge amount of very hard lettuce off the second.
I didn't call my Sister-in-law until we got off the plane because she lives pretty close and we had to get our bag. By the time we got downstairs, the bag was already there, the fastest I ever got a bag at our airport.
We waited a few minutes and my lovely Sister-in-law picked us up and took us to her house, where we had parked my car. She told us that she was getting ready to call and complain about the car being parked there until her Husband told her it was my car.
We had a couple of holes cut in the walls of our dining and living room for a leak that occurred a few weeks earlier in a pipe that went under the slab. I had hired a guy who we'd used before to fix them and do some painting, hopefully while we were away. On Tuesday, driving home, I tried calling him several times, but got a busy signal. I guess his phone wasn't working. So we had no idea whether the work was started or not. When we walked into the house we were pleasantly surprised to find it was done and done beautifully. You couldn't even tell there ever was a hole. The colors looked great and Joan was thrilled.
All in all, this was one of the best vacations we ever took!
