Today is the funeral for grandma Myers. I was up probably around seven thirty. We had a bit to do this morning and we needed to get out the door on the early side. The funeral officially starts at ten but we are hoping to get underway to get there closer to nine.
We all had to shower and stuff this morning and I could not take a short shower with the terrible head cold that I have. I need the hot steam to be able to breath even if just for a little while. This cold is really kicking my butt.
We finally left the house just after nine. Gwen and Mike had already left to make sure that they were getting there ahead of us.
We arrived and did the car dance to get ourselves into our proper spot in the funeral procession line. We are pretty far up in the line.
We had probably half an hour of just hanging out with the immediate family before people really started to arrive for the funeral. Luciana was not feeling great on her stomach and sat with Dominica on a couch in the back while Liesl sat on Monica’s lap on a couch near me and cried a little and slept a lot. Not unlike grandpa Myers’ funeral a few years ago where Monica held baby Luciana for the entire service. I sat between Joe and Mike in the second row.
It was a nice service. I heard the story of grandma having gotten her foot caught in a saddle stirrup when she was young and being dragged by the horse and taken over a barded wire fence and how she had never allowed any of her girls to ride saddled horses after that, which is why they all grew up learning to ride bare back. This was shocking to me that I was not aware of this story as just forty years ago I myself got my foot caught in a stirrup like that in a stampede and was almost killed. How did these two stories not get combined?
They also talked about grandma’s incredible love of travel which, very likely, is my primary source of it in me. No one else in the family traveled as much as my mother’s parents. Even with all of the travel that I have done, they still went to so many places that I have not yet made it to, especially in places like Germany. We are catching up pretty fast, though.
After the service we drove to the cemetery where my uncle Denny and uncle Don, along with my cousin Brett and the cousin “in laws” Mike and Joe were pall bearers with me. The service at the grave site was very short but nice. Luciana made sure to get one of the pink carnations from the casket for my dad since he was unable to come out to join us in Ohio for the funeral.
From the cemetery we all went to the Center Church at the corner of Georgetown and Ravenna (44) which I have never been inside of before. We had a nice little gathering there. Probably about two hours. There was a small meal and some pie. I had two pieces of cherry rhubarb, it was amazing.
After church we went to grandma’s house for the afternoon. The family just hung out there until six when it was time for the cousins and Aunt Gayle to drive to a local vineyard to go to their Crush House for a nice dinner before the Millers hit the road to drive to New York.
Dinner was really nice, the place was great and the food was awesome. We had a great dinner, everyone really enjoyed it and it was nice for all of us “youngsters” to get a chance to visit together (Brett and Robin were the only ones of our age that were not there.)
From dinner we returned to Mike and Gwen’s house to pack up. We were there for probably an hour before we managed to get underway and start driving towards New York which takes just under five hours.
The weather was not horrible but was not great for our drive tonight. Some rain and tons of wind. We were blown all over the place for the entire drive. It was pretty fatiguing and I got a speeding ticket east of Cleveland which we have to deal with now, although it is only $165 and I just need to mail it is. So not the end of the world and my first speeding ticket in a really long time.
We did alright and got to dad’s house sometime after three thirty in the morning. It took us way longer to get started and way longer on the drive than we had hoped that it would and I was just so tired when we got in but we made it and we do not need to drive anywhere now until either Saturday evening or Sunday morning when we go down to Brooklyn for our flight to Italy.
We visited with dad until easily five in the morning, then were off to bed. The girls were not very tired because they had slept in the car nearly all night. And dad takes naps and is up on a semi-regular basis so it did not affect him all that much. But Dominica and I were ready to drop and needed our sleep.