Sheep Guarding Llama

What a crazy summer it has been.  And hard to believe that as summer is drawing to a close that we are going to be heading down south to Texas to go to our own house in just two days!  Boy have our plans changed a lot throughout this year.  Even at the end of the spring when we were leaving Romania we had no idea that we were going to be doing anything like this.  Our lives really are rather adventurous.

 

This evening we went out to the 585 Rockin’ Burger Bar with Art and Danielle.  We watched a local band play.  The girls had a good time.  I got to drive Art’s new Camaro up there, too.

Only a few days left in New York for the year.  We are leaving to go to Texas later this week and will not be back to New York until 2017 and, if all goes to plan, only for a week or so then.

Today’s project is to buy a minivan.  We went up to Webster this evening and did some shopping at the Hertz Car Sales location there.  Dominica and looked and they have a minivan available there, three actually, that are 2015s and essentially identical to the Nissan Quest that we drove over the weekend, also from Hertz.

We spend many hours looking at the minivans and managed to pick out one that we wanted and got that one reserved for us.  We need to get paperwork for our Chevy Spark and come up with it tomorrow so that we can do a trade in.  The other two minivans are going to auction today so they are going to hold back the one for us.  Hopefully everything goes well tomorrow.

We have had great luck with every Nissan that we have ever driven and I like that they are part of the Renault group who makes all of my favourite cars in Europe, including Dacia in Romania.  We really need something larger as our stuff will not fit in the Spark to drive it down to Texas later this week!  That is going to be a problem.

It was decently late when we got back home, but we are looking forward to having a shiny new vehicle tomorrow.

Only real thing on the agenda today is to return the Nissan Quest back up to the Rochester Airport.  We are just so tired.  But glad to have our kids back with us.  SGL is woefully behind and is going to be.  I have just no time to even think about trying to keep this on track.

Today the big project was to drive down to Pennsylvania with the Ralstons and retrieve the Chevy Spark that has been down there all of this time.  It has been so long that we practically forgot that we even owned a car!  What a whirlwind two weeks it has been.

Very long drive down and back and we are all just so tired.  At least we got many hours in the car to decompress and talk through how things had gone with the conference and do some planning for next year while things were still fresh.

This evening Dominica and I ran up to Avon to look at minivans at the Chrysler dealer there.  I had heard that they were one of those typical “car salesman” places where they just play games non-stop and that’s exactly what they did.  They were so busy playing games with all of their other customers that even though we were there for about an hour, looked at everything on the lot and even went searching for a sales associated to help there was none to be found and their showroom was just full of other people not being helped just sitting at tables getting the run around.  It was exactly how I pictured the car buying experience to be and I was happy to just leave.  I wanted nothing more to do with that place after it lived up to the nasty description that I had heard of it.  I don’t take the scams of car buying well.  If the sales person isn’t actually authorized to make a sale, why are they there?  Just to piss me off?  Just to waste money?

I’ll buy a car somewhere that actually wants to sell cars.

Dominica basically got no sleep last night.  She got home more or less just in time for us to get up and head off up to the city to hang out with Jason who was still lingering from MangoCon.  We picked him up at the hotel and drove up to Lake Ontario and hung out up there on the beach.  We got Abbott’s Frozen Custard then went down to the Tilted Kilt to get drinks while we waited for his friends that he was having lunch with to get to the BBQ place across the street.  We dropped him of for his lunch then Dominica and I got on the road to drive, still in the rented Nissan Quest, east to Frankfort to pick up the kids that we have not seen all week!

It was late afternoon when we got to Frankfort and got our Liesl and Luciana.  It was pretty late in the evening when we finally got back to dad’s place and it was late at night when I got the note from Maggie that she had safely arrived back in Panama City.  She is probably the last person from MangoCon 2016 to make it back home.  If not, she’s is nearly at the end of the list.  Nearly everyone is home.  Now it is time for sleep.

I did what I could to play some catch up this evening, but I was pretty tired.

The conference is now over and today is our day after fun trip to Letchworth State Park.  Danielle and I had to be up early and go to the Rochester Airport so that we could rent two minivans to drive everyone down to the park.  We were so exhausted while trying to do that today.  That was rough.

We finally got back to the hotel and rounded people up for the trip.  We had a few that had planned to go but were just in too rough of shape to be able to make it.

The drive down was over an hour and we all got lost looking for the pavilion that we were supposed to be in.  I should note that Dominica was riding with me in a Nissan Quest that we rented from Hertz (this will matter later on) and we really liked how it drove and how nice it was.  Better than Chrysler minivans that we have dealt with.  We have always been happy any time that we have had Nissan cars in the past.

We finally got to the pavilion and got set up.  It was an outdoor BBQ and the weather was pretty nice.  Some people went for walks, some just hung out at the pavilion.  It was fun, but I am pretty sure that we will not do something like this next year.  Too much work and coordination to make it all come together.  Would have been better to just hang out up at the convention area and do something much more casual.

We only stayed at the park for a few hours, then it was time to drive everyone back up to the city.

Lots of people decided to go out tonight, but I needed to get sleep.  We are going to come back up tomorrow morning and hang out with some people who are remaining.  But tonight we are getting back down to the farm and getting some rest.  Tomorrow afternoon we are getting the kids from Utica.  We are exhausted and don’t want to get sick.  Staying awake is barely possible.

Dominica went with Danielle out to Niagara Falls to watch Art and The Fallen play as the headliners in a festival out there.  They did not go on until after midnight, I don’t think, and it was really late, like around five when she got back to dad’s farm.