After the long, busy weekend and the busy trip to New York City yesterday, today is a day to recover and relax. We have been so busy all weekend. Today we just hung around in Frankfort and recovered. Lots of sleep.
I ended up working on building, or setting up at least, a VyOS router today. That ended up being a full day project and I was working on it until five in the morning! Today ended up being pretty busy. But it was just me sitting in the kitchen at the table all day dealing with VyOS.
Major work accomplished, though, and I am very happy that I have the things working that I needed to get working. So it was all worth it and I was very happy when I finally managed to head off to bed.
Today is our big family trip to Manhattan! We have just enough people that we could not fit in a single car. Francesca drove the Ford Explorer down and I drove the Malibu that we are borrowing from Art. We got up and moving early this morning so that we could get down to the Croton Harmon train station while it was still morning. What an exhausting morning!
Tired Liesl
The trip down was tiring, but uneventful. We got onto the first non-peak hours train into the city that we could. That all went very well.
All Six Cousins Riding Metro North
We got into the city and pretty quickly got ourselves to Times Square and onto the Big Bus tour of the city. We road the one route all morning doing midtown and uptown. This is actually the first time that the Miller family has done a bus tour in New York City at all. Having lived there for so long, we never really got around to doing it.
For lunch we went to the famous Ellen’s Stardust Diner which was decent but kind of boring and the food was outrageously expensive and if you don’t eat incredibly quickly you see the very short show repeating. It’s mildly interesting but not worth the stop at all.
After lunch we road the second bus loop covering downtown. On this loop the kids got to see my old office at 111 Wall St. as well as my old office at 388 and 390 Greenwich Avenue. No one was very excited to see them, though.
The bus tours were fun. But we were tired quickly from the intense heat. I rode most of the day down below out of the sun with our kids so that they would not overheat. Most everyone else cooked in the bright sun.
On the Tour Bus with Liesl and Luciana
When we were done it was some very quick shopping in Times Square. Then back to Grand Central Terminal, some food and on the Metro North back to Croton Harmon station.
The ride home got pretty exciting. Not that far along I84 Francesca’s new Ford Explorer died on the side of the road. Some combination of throttle body and computer issues. We ended up having to loop back for her and thought that we were going to be stranded there for the night. We lost easily an hour dealing with that but it eventually got started and we limped back home with us following her carefully to make sure that they were going to make it. That made for a very long day!
We had breakfast at the Best Western again this morning. They do a decent breakfast but they are not prepared for the number of waffles that our clan wants to get all at once. We back the waffle line up something terrible in the morning.
Luciana at Breakfast at the Best Western
We got on the road back home pretty early.
Liesl Ready for the Drive
This afternoon Madeline and I hung out while she played Mass Effect on the Steam laptop at her grandparents’ house. She got through quite a lot of the initial game today! That was fun. I had been playing Mass Effect some while I was at dad’s house last week, too. I’m enjoying playing through it again. Such a good story.
Tomorrow we are heading down to Manhattan for the day. Just doing a single day trip of sight seeing by bys around the city.
Today is our full day down in Waverly. We got up at the Gutherie or Best Western as it is now called, in Sayre, Pennsylvania and had breakfast there in the hotel and relaxed for a bit before heading to the family reunion on the farm.
Full day of family reunion stuff on the farm today. Mostly hanging around on the deck. The kids ran around and played with their cousins all day. They mostly had a great time, although there is always plenty of fighting, too.
I went out for a few shopping runs throughout the day. But mostly the day was pretty tame.
They tried doing outdoor movies tonight with the projector and stuff but it really did not work and the kids were not interested in sitting still for a movie.
This evening the big excitement was that Emily was running barefoot through the yard just before it was time to leave and her big toe rolled under her foot and she broke her foot. We did not know that it was broken at the time, although we suspected that it was. She was in a lot of pain and we spent a few hours dealing with that, although she did not go get it looked at by a doctor tonight.
Our fourth of July tradition has long been driving down to Waverly for the Doty family reunion and Fourth of July celebration. This morning we drove down straight to the party. This is my first year that I am able to go for several days rather than just going down for one day like I always have in the past. Liesl and I missed the longer party last year because we had to leave early to drive down to Texas together. This year we all get to stay.
Today was a small gathering for food and stuff with the family on the farm. This evening we all went over to James’ place for the big bonfire where they burn a couch and chair and stuff.
Scott and Dominica in the Bonfire Light
The kids had a great time playing with all of their extended cousins all day long. We figure that they will sleep really well tonight.
We stayed at the Gutherie tonight. It’s a Best Western, now. Same hotel that we stayed in many years ago. Normally we stay in the Hampton, but they were full up tonight.
We got in late and several people were hungry. Emily sent me out to find McDonald’s which ended up being closed and so I went across town looking for Wendy’s, which I was told was open late. Liesl was hungry so went with me. We ended up being gone for about an hour. We got food for the teenagers from Wendy’s, then went to the gas station across the street from the hotel to get food for Liesl.
Wendy’s ended up getting all of our food wrong and none of it was edible that Dominica and I got. We were rather unhappy. I at least managed to eat the small salad that I got but had not ordered. Liesl at her snacks from the gas station.
