Sheep Guarding Llama

This is it, our last full day in the US for the next six months.  We are heading to the airport first thing tomorrow morning in our rental car and will be flying out towards Norway tomorrow night out of New York City.

I was the first one up this morning, followed by Luciana and Dominica.  Dominica’s first adventure of the day was over-stuffing her suitcase until it blew out.  So we have to locate more luggage today in order to be able to travel.  Always some new problem for the globe trotting family.

Dad was not feeling great today, so just the Millers went to Geneseo to get lunch at the Omega Grill.  After lunch we went shopping at Walmart and picked up a new suitcase, the silver iFly, to replace the one that Dominica killed this morning.  The new one is a few inches larger so we will have a little additional packing space (but no extra weight) for this trip.

We dropped the kids off at the house; dad was feeling a bit better.  And we went up to the city to pick up our rental car from Enterprise at the Rochester Airport.  It was about five when we left the house, our reservation was to pick up the car at six.

We got the car, it ended up being a Dodge Charger which is functional but a really crappy car.  It has zero power, not the best visibility, looks ridiculous, drives mediocre, has poor controls and is one of the silliest interiors ever and has rather poor interior space leaving us struggling to be able to get the luggage into a car significantly larger than cars like the Ford Focus that fit the luggage easily.  A very impractical car, for sure.  But it was cheap.

Once we had the car we decided to have a date since this was our last time having a babysitter for maybe six months!  We went to Red Robin as I have never been there before.  Dominica has told me how good it was so I figured that I would try it out.  We got there and there was quite a line.  We got seated and then waited forever for what turned out to basically be mediocre fast food.  It was fine, but the veggie burger was just a BOCA burger that we could make at home for about one dollar and ten minutes.  Not ten dollars and ninety minutes.  And the restaurant makes a big deal about “bottomless” French fries which just means that they are not very good and brought in ridiculously tiny quantities and no one ever comes to check on you again so after you’ve sat there for an hour kind of hungry and wondering if there is another restaurant that might actually care to feed you, you give up and go home and they act like they would have brought you more fries had you waited a few more hours.  Overall the food was meh and the service was pathetic.  I’ll never eat there again.  I’d rather get “plenty” of French fries up front rather than wait forever to not get “bottomless” ones.  Clearly just a scam, which is what I suspected with anything bottomless.  Basically, it was a bad version of McDonald’s.   Cost more, takes way longer, food isn’t as good.  If you are in Rochester and want a burger, go to Wahl’s.  Skip Red Robin.

From our rather unimpressive final dinner in the US (just a strong reminder of how much better things will be shortly) we went back to the house.  Dad said that the girls were really good all evening, even Luciana.

Packing stuff and off to bed tonight.  We leave for New York City in the morning!

We get only three days at dad’s this week.  Today is Friday and we are halfway through our time “back home” before we are off to Italy.  This morning I actually set up my laptop in the kitchen and started working on catching up some.  I did not even bother to get online yesterday at all.  So I spent much of the day writing and posting.  There is a lot to do before we are heading out of town this weekend.  This week really threw us for a loop and we are not very well prepared for all of the upcoming travel.  It does not feel real that we are just days away from heading to Italy.

On top of everything else, Europe is caught in the grip of a massive cold snap that has caused scores of deaths and has the BBC describing southern Italy as looking like Siberia.

Liesl is still feeling sick this morning but Luciana has gotten over her cold and fever.  I still have my cold, but am improving.  Hopefully it will not be all that bad by the time that we go to fly.

Dad made grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup today.  Luciana ended up loving her grilled cheese and ate a whole, huge sandwich all on her own.

Dominica got our car prenotated today for the weekend.  We have a car from Enterprise that we will pick up from the Rochester airport on Saturday and drop off at JFK in Brooklyn on Sunday.

We did panic credit card management today.  Always stupid things that we need to address at the last second.  We remembered that I needed to renew my International Driver’s Permit this afternoon, so I quickly drove up to Pittsford to go to the AAA office there.

Only took a few minutes and less than $32 to get my IDP.  Now we are all set for the year.  We have learned our lesson with that in Spain when we were there with Rachel and she was unable to rent a car.

I stopped at Root 31 and picked up coffee for Dominica and myself.  Real coffee, more like we will be getting in Europe in a few days.

Dominica wanted me to get food on the way home, so she sent me to University Hots in Geneseo to get our last garbage plates of the season.

I brought dinner home then we watched some more travel videos on YouTube while we ate dinner.

We all slept in a lot this morning.  We are very exhausted after such a long week and staying up so late last night.  I actually only got up for maybe three or four hours before Luciana and I decided to just go down for a nap.  Luciana mostly did not nap and just hung out on the futon with me snuggling while I actually rested or slept for about six hours.  Boy did I need it.  I felt so much better after all of that sleep. I have been so sick for days.

Once I was up I ordered pizza from Papa Roni’s and drove down to Pavilion to pick it up.  I had a semi truck pull out in front of me, running the stop sight from 246 going onto 63.  Thank goodness it was not icy or I would have slammed into him.

I got two pizzas and loads of blue cheese dressing and brought it home where we fired up Rick Steves on YouTube and watched some of his stuff on Rome while we ate.

A very short day for me.  Back to bed on the early side.  I really need my sleep.

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.

I managed to get four hours of sleep last night.  I was awake by six thirty.  I came downstairs and got some water.  Bianca slept with Liesl all night.  It’s very sweet.  Liesl loves having a dog with whom to snuggle and she needed her tonight.  It worked out well.

We got dressed and ready and I drove everyone in the Quest to the calling hours.  We got stuck on the outskirts of Canton waiting of a never ending train that actually stopped and parked blocking the road that we were on.  A bit ridiculous.  Mike said that it can take forty five minutes for a train to move out there.  So we had to turn around and drive into Canton to get to a bridge to go over the train!  What a pain.

Calling hours went all evening.  It was nice getting a chance to hang out with so much of the family.  I see them so seldom.  We got to meet my cousin Brett’s fiancee Robin, as well, whom we have not yet met.  They have been together for more than a year now.  We tend to be pretty out of touch with everything in Ohio.

After the calling hours we all went back to grandma’s house for the evening and spent the evening there with just the close family.