Watkins Glen...

2 August 2023: 

[Catch-up post...]

It seems like a failed effort from the start to describe Watkins Glen State Park. Just amazing...

Seneca Falls to Plum Point...

1 August 2023: 

[Catch-up post...]

The second day of trip meant visiting the site of the first Women's Rights Convention, then heading down to our second hotel, right on Seneca Lake. 

Road tripping with Vogel...

31 July 2023: 

[Catch-up post]

Kicked off a mini-vacation on Monday, driving up to PA to pick up Vogel before we headed up to Seneca Falls, a place that's been on my "I need to visit there" list for years.

"on a bus with my team"

20 July 2022: Long and kind of stressful day, but I did manage to get some stuff done. And the podcasts I listened to on my morning walk has been on my mind all day: You Are Good's episode about A League of Their Own. When Sarah said, "I think all I really want is to be on a bus with my team," I thought, "same!" and have been thinking it ever since. 

Being on the bus (well, van) was 100% my favorite part of being on a team when I was a (very bad) junior/senior high athlete. It's great anytime I am driving somewhere with my (non-athletic) "teams." It something I am always up for. Sounds amazing right about now. 

Bourbon in the morning...

10 August 2018: Before heading home, we checked out the Town Branch Distillery and Brewery, another really impressive facility.

All in all, a fantastic trip.

Kentucky Horse Park

9 August 2018:

[Catch-up post]

Thursday found us in Lexington, at the Kentucky Horse Park, a place Amy wanted to check out because she loves her some horses. It's a really impressive place and quite enjoyable.

Me checking out Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner, Funny Cide. He ignored me.  

Waiting for the "Hall  of Champions" show to start.

I really dug this Puerto Rican dancing horse (I think it is called a Paso Fino?) that we saw at the Parade of Breeds.

Bats + Gatsby = Batsby?

8 August 2018:

[Catch-up post]

Some pictures from Day One of a short vacation to Kentucky. Just one from each major stop...

First, from the Louisville Slugger Factory...here's me holding Mickey Mantle's bat!

Then, from our awesome hotel, here's the bar where Fitzgerald used to drink, in the hotel that helped inspire The Great Gatsby. 

Busy Fourth...

4 July 2018:

[Catch-up post]

What a weird, packed Fourth of July it was! Amy and I started the day off in Point Pleasant, waking up from an (uneventful) night spent at the "haunted" Lowe Hotel. Then it was off to Weston, to visit the Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. Along the way, we stopped at Mike Fink's Grave (a bit hard to find!) and drove through Glenville, Amy's old stomping grounds. The Asylum was almost overwhelming in terms of its size and the stories it hold. Well worth the trip. After that, it was home to Shepherdstown before taking in a terrific fireworks show in Hagerstown. Slept very well last night, as you might imagine.

Meeting the Mothman

3 July 2018:

[Catch-up post]

Road trip to Point Pleasant! Met the Mothman and stayed at a "haunted" hotel. (Nothing to report on the latter front...)

So long, Pittsburgh...

3 June 2018:

One last stop (at the top of the Duquesne Incline) before heading home. It was a great trip.

More Pittsburgh...

2 June 2018:

[Catch-up Post]

A great day in Pittsburgh. Some silly photo highlights...

With Cory at the Warhol Museum.

Tim and Kevin stealing the show at the Warhol.

Being ridiculous in front of the Willie Stargell statue at PNC Park.

Pittsburgh bound!

1 June 2018:

[Catch-up post]

Off for a quick road-trip to Pittsburgh with some of my favorite people: Tim, Kevin, Hannah, and Cory. We go here yesterday (Friday) and are having a blast so far. Just a couple of pictures might suffice for a post?

Pit-stop find: this inspiration to "share a Coke" with my favorite Williams.

Lord, this dinner we had a Lydia Bastianich's restaurant...whew! Delicious from start to finish--and the finish was this limoncello tiramisu. 

Road Trip wrap-up...

20 July 2014: A traffic-free, event-free, and fun ride back home after our road trip: the perfect end to a perfect road trip!

Road Trip: Downton costumes and Hamlet!

19 July 2014: Saturday was a nearly perfect summer day. My friends Anna, Hannah, and I took a mini-road trip to Delaware to see the Downton Abbey costume exhibit at Winterthur. In planning the trip, I realized that the Delaware Shakespeare Festival was putting on Hamlet that evening--outdoors, picnicking encouraged. What more could three English-minded folks ask for?

The trip up was fun and traffic-free. The exhibit was fun and interesting. The play was great. The weather was perfect. I mean, picnicking outdoors in July sounds like a risky proposition, but it was pleasant and breezy and lovely. Before the show started, the stage manager came out and made some general announcements. He mentioned that although the forecast called for a 0% chance of rain, if it did rain, the policy is to continue in light rain and, if it gets heavy, stop for twenty minutes and reassess. But again...0% chance of rain, right?

...Until Act 4, Scene 7 (really close to the end). And a light rain started. And the actor playing Laertes, in the really dramatic and sad scene where he learns of his sister's drowning, says the line" Too much of water has thou, poor Ophelia." And the whole crowd cracked up. The actor, God bless him, broke just a bit, briefly smiling and suppressing a chuckle before recovering quite well. It was a terrific moment. You could feel everyone--the actors, the crew, the audience--just hoping and pulling for the show to finish before the rain picked up. It actually ended (more or less) by the sword fight in the final scene. Anyway, a great night and a great day!

Oh--and I won the drawing for a free t-shirt!

Some pictures:

Cora's outfit from Baby Sybil's christening. 

Mary and Matthew's outfits from the cricket match.

Daisy and Mrs. Patmore's dresses.

Sigh! Mary and Matthew's outfits from their engagement scene. The scene itself was playing on a large scene in the background, with snowfall projected all along the wall. Very emotional!

One of Matthew's suits.

Sybil's shocking pants!

Sybil and Mary's dresses from Edith's (canceled) wedding. Edith's dress was there, too, but my picture didn't come out.

The exhibit had memorable lines of dialogue on the walls. This one made me laugh.

 

 Anna and Hannah picnicking before the show.

Alumni Weekend, Part One

11 April 2014: When you have an awesome weekend with some of the best friends you could ask for, you also find yourself with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to "what you are thankful for" posts. So here and now, with a couple of days distance, I'll just pick what comes to my mind first for each day of my visit back to Roanoke College for my 15-year reunion.

For Friday, I'll pick the fun and ridiculous ride Jane and I shared as we drove down. She is my ideal road trip buddy, I think. We can be silly and serious, talk about the mundane and the profound, and there's never a dull moment. And she makes amazing playlists.

Even more links...

These are the non-academic variety.

1) On my last trip up the NJ Turnpike, Jane (my awesome road-trip buddy!) and I discussed at length the names of the rest-stops along the way. I still don't get, for instance, why they have a James Fenimore Cooper rest-stop in New Jersey. My favorite name? The Walt Whitman Service Area, of course. Anyway, Gawker takes on the idea of renaming the rest- stops, and it's all kinds of funny.

2) The headline reads, "Veronica Mars Movie Could Still Happen, Arrested Development Perhaps Not." What the heck is the difference between "could still happen" and "perhaps not"? Anyway, I've got a bit of a sad (possible) spoiler alert here: as sad as it is to admit, neither one of these is going to happen folks. We were lucky to get each of these two shows for three awesome seasons. The final stage of grieving is, after all, letting go. Now let's dry our tears as we enjoy our DVDs.

3) Every time someone in my family (usually my dad) sends out a ludicrous conspiracy email, I head to snopes.com, find the de-bunking article, and send it back to him and whoever else he sent that first email to. (Is that obnoxious? I can't help myself.) Anyway, here's a cool profile of the folks behind snopes.com.

4) And finally, cute boys with cats. Yes, please.

Quick trip to Philadelphia...

A couple of Saturdays ago, David (who had driven up to WV on Friday night) joined me for a quick visit to Philly to see Vogel. We were only there about 24 hours, but had a blast.


David and Vogel at lunch at Solaris, a yummy restaurant right in Vogel's neighborhood.

After lunch, we headed to downtown Philly, specifically towards Independence Hall.


Independence Hall.


A really great shot of Vogel and David in front of Independence Hall. We didn't actually get to go in since they'd already given out all the tickets for the day, but there are tons of other fun (and free!) things to do in the immediate area, as this very helpful guide in the visitor center explained to us. We decided on two activities right away: seeing the Liberty Bell and visiting Franklin Court.


In line to see the Liberty Bell. Notice David playing with his iphone. He is so in love with that thing. He kept using it to look up where we were and give us background information. He was like a little kid with a toy he wanted us to covet. And it kind of worked...I want one.


The bell. I had seen it once before--way back in third grade, but I don't remember getting this close to it. And hey--I even got a shot of the crack. (Ha ha.)


Vogel wondering why I am taking so long to snap the picture. Sorry. But I posted this one in part because of dude in the back who is making a peace sign. What kind of adult does this in someone else's picture? It made me laugh, actually. I guess he couldn't help himself.


A much better shot.


Not sure what David is doing here. I think it's his impression of Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin holding a shotgun. (He had just watched the SNL clip of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler).


Now the non-silly shot.


After the Bell, we headed down to Franklin Court. On the way, we laughed at this sign. "Check out that funny looking lady!" I said, before my friends explained that it was supposed to be Ben Franklin in a chef's hat. Still...pretty lady-like, we thought.


"Life-size Jellybean Children and Butterflies"? Huh? Sounds terrifying to me. It was an exhibit here.


Soon we arrived at Franklin Court, where Ben Franklin's house used to stand and which today boasts an underground museum (tell me that "underground" doesn't make it sound a thousand times cooler!). Notice the white sign in this picture. It explains that Franklin would have walked through this little alleyway every day. I thought that was pretty awesome and asked Vogel and David to pretend they were Franklin walking through. Vogel, who is always happy to oblige my photo-shoot demands, did her best. David...not so much.


Here they are both next to the sign. Notice Vogel's arm. She still can't stop acting like Franklin walking home.


Franklin's house was torn down about 20 years after he died, but there are some very important markers of the structures that used to be there, like, for instance, his father-in-law's toilet.


Or Franklin's privy!


Inside the the underground (ohhh!) museum we saw lots of Franklin's inventions, including this one that impressed us the most: a chair with a built-in step ladder.


I also liked this one--a four-sided music stand so that a quartet could play.


After the room of inventions, we entered this huge space with dozens of phone and a wall of numbers. You could dial an extension and "talk" to a famous person who was influenced by Franklin in some way. It's a pretty cool way of illustrating just how influential Franklin was and is. We called Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain, among others. Vogel loved the phones so much that it was hard to tear her away.

At the end of the museum there was a little theater showing a Franklin Film Festival--including Ben and Me, which I adored as a kid and would have loved to see again. But we were about 40 minutes away from the next show and David was getting hungry. He was also getting entirely too jealous of Franklin. "Man, how come I never invented anything?" he asked. So we moved on.


After a brief stop for a drink and a snack, we walked through a park where some well...interesting performance art was going on.


Now admittedly, we only stayed for a little while to listen to this guy sing about rivers (represented by the blue tarp behind him), so it could be that the show was very good. But just the part we saw left us trying not to laugh out loud (and getting dirty looks from a Ben Franklin impersonator nearby.) Let's just say he rhymed like Adam Sandler's "Cajun Man" and used works like "olfaction" and "putrification" as his end rhymes. You can read just a bit about him here.

After walking around a bit more, we headed back to Vogel's, crashed for a bit, and then had a lovely dinner here. The next day it was back to WV for me and NC for David. Still, it was a great little visit.