June 15, 2008: Father’s Day and the Taconic Parkway

Happy Father’s Day!

I got to sleep in a little this morning which was nice.  I was pretty tired.  Dominica decided that her back hurt sleeping on the floor in the living room so she moved to a couch on one side of the room.  Oreo wanted his own space for a change so he slept on a couch on the side by me just over top of me.  So I ended up having the floor-bed all to myself although I didn’t notice and stayed all curled up in a ball on the one side so as not to take up Dominica’s space.  Dexter isn’t able to sleep with us these days because he gets so nervous and/or excited that he pants and licks and runs around and doesn’t let us sleep at all.  It is very sad because he is so happy to have us visit.  He really misses us but we just can’t get any sleep if he is trying to sleep with us.

Joe made French toast for breakfast this morning.  We had that and donuts from the Friendly Bakery.  They have the best donuts ever.

For a late lunch we had shish-kabobs – which isn’t actually true as the word kebab (or kabab) meants fried meat and can mean grilled meat but certainly doesn’t mean grilled veggies like Dominica and I had.  But we had grilled veggies on skewers anyway.  We also had grilled pineapple which was really good.

While looking up kebabs to make sure that I knew what the word meant, as I thought that it required meat but wasn’t completely positive, I discovered what a Döner kebab is.  It really sheds a foreshadow across the Donner Party.  (A döner is a slab of meat roasted on a skewer – they were sort of the “roasted meat” party.)

Anyway, we left Frankfort around three in the afternoon and drove out to Newburgh on the Thruway making good time and then decided to head east on i84 and then to take the Taconic Parkway down through Dutchess, Putnam and Westchester Counties to see what they were like a ways farther east than we had been last time through.

We quickly discovered that you can see nothing from the Taconic Parkway and that it is an extremely unpleasent road to drive on in the more northern counties as it is so narrow and has so many people driving twenty to thirty miles an hour over the speed limit.  There is no room at all.  We will be avoiding that in the future.

By the time that we got down to Westchester County we had decided that driving on the parkway wasn’t doing us any good.  Just as we decided to get off of the parkway the exit for Peekskill came up.  I looked at Min and said that that seemed fortuitous so we got off and started exploring Peekskill from the east.

We decided that we really were meant to get off at that particular exit and to go to Peekskill as we, at total random, drove right past the development that we had been looking at recently and were really interested in!  We had been saying that it was too bad that we hadn’t bothered to look up addresses before driving because we could have driven past places that we were interested in – and just after saying it I looked to my left, saw the place and turned it.  So we were able to see it anyway, and so far we like it.

This was our first time actually being in Peekskill and not just driving by and we were really shocked to discover that it is just like Ithaca.  It is a similar size (but without the “strip” district with all of the chain stores and restaurants) and without the colleges, but it has the quaint, artsy downtown area, has the waterfront and the high hills on the side much like Cayuga Heights East that looks down on the city.

We went down to the Division Street Grill in downtown Peekskill and had dinner there.  The table that Dominica and I sat at is actually in the picture on the web site.  Just go to the link and we sat at the table in the dead center of the image.  (That is, the center of the image not the middle of where your eye is drawn.  We sat at the small, two person table in the corner by the outside window and the wall.)  The food was really good.  It was a very Ithaca-like experience.

We did a tiny bit of walking after dinner and then drove towards “home” in Newark.  It was around eleven when we got back home.

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