Today is the big day for our girls. Their favourite treat of the entire year is going to Enchanted Forest Water Safari in Old Forge, New York. The have been waiting two whole years to get to go back there. They are going to be so, so, so happy after this. This is why we know that we have to be in New York every summer no matter what, they will never be okay with not going to Water Safari.
The Cousins at Enchanted Forest in Old Forge
The whole family had a great time at the water park. I’m a bit sad that I did not get to go with them, again. But it isn’t like I enjoy water parks or anything like that. But it would be nice to get to spend the day with my girls when they are having so much fun, but in reality they are very busy with their cousins anyway and would have no time to spend with me anyway.
Eric Millen and Scott Alan Miller at Village Tavern in Geneseo
This evening Eric and I met up at the village tavern in Geneseo for beers and hung out there for a while. We stayed until they closed the kitchen and missed getting dinner. I ended up driving around Geneseo trying to find food and, eventually, found that everything except for McDonald’s was closed. I just missed Aunt Cookies, Tim Horton’s, Taco Bell, everything. I can’t believe that in a college town that there is no way to eat after nine in the evening!
Pretty quiet day hanging out with dad and doing some more writing and posting today. The Tocco clan is heading to Enchanted Forest Water Safari tomorrow, the girls have been talking about going there for about eighteen months, now. It is their favourite thing to do ever and are so, so excited that they are going to finally get to go tomorrow. They went two years ago and loved it so much, and were so excited to go last year and the weather never allowed it to happen and they have talked about it at least weekly for the entire last year. They talk about summer as being their favourite season: “Because that’s when we get to go to Water Safari”, they say!
This evening dad and I went to Tom Wahl’s in Avon. I’ve been craving their veggie burgers and their amazing French fries for a year. They have one of those food items that just drives me crazy when I am away. There are some things that you just cannot get when you are away from home: Buffalo style pizza from Papa Roni’s (Davis’), subs from Aunt Cookies in Geneseo, veggie burgers and fries from Tom Wahl’s, etc. I also can’t wait to get Rockfish’s Santa Fe fish tacos and volcano shrimp when in Dallas. And Panda Express shrimp, too. You miss a lot of food when you travel a lot.
More news from the UK taking up a big part of the day. Now that the Brexit is hitting the markets, the British Pound is in total collapse and has lost a tonne of its value. Dominica and I are talking about whether or not we need to change plans to go tour Scotland and Wales this coming year rather than places that we had been planning to go because the Pound is so cheap that we really cannot pass up the opportunity to leverage it.
The pound was $2.10 when Dominica and I last visited the UK. Today it is at $1.33 and it is expected to level out around $1.31 and we’ve seen it as low as $1.29. That is absolutely crazy. The British have lost an enormous amount of their national wealth practically overnight. Something like one third of the value of their economy just evaporated.
I wrote all morning and had my phone call this afternoon. Today is Wednesday.
This evening I gave dad a break and drove up to Henrietta to meet up with Dustin from MangoLassi for some beers at MacGregors on Jefferson Road. I have not been to MacGregors in probably twenty years!
Dustin was there before me and had a table outside on the back deck. It was nice weather in Rochester tonight, so perfect for sitting outside. But before too long, the mosquitoes came out and we moved inside.
We went over to the Tilted Kilt before heading back home. I didn’t even know that there was one of these in Rochester. So many chain bars cycle through on Jefferson, I can’t keep up with what is up there.
Scott Alan Miller and Dustin at MacGregors
Dustin and I have been talking almost daily on MangoLassi for nearly a year. But we have never met in person. That’s one of the weird things about online communities: you get to know people really well but don’t even know what they look like, sound like or realistically even how old they are. Dustin guessed, even meeting me in person, that was “only in my early fifties.” Argh.
Solid forty here, folks.
I have been working very hard on SGL to get updates coming in a timely fashion. Still a bit of June left to go but I have lots of scattered July and August updates already written and ready to post once I fill in the gaps in between. This summer has just been so busy, no chances to get caught up! Doing my best.
A year ago today, we were at dad’s place on the farm and dad was out mowing the lawn. This would have been after our time in Spain but before we headed off down south to Texas and on to Panama. I got this great picture of Luciana in my old bedroom (now dad’s office) watching my dad mow the lawn out of my bedroom windows. So adorable.
Luciana Watching Grandpa Mow the Lawn on June 24, 2015 from Her Dad’s Old Bedroom Windows
What a wild and exciting year it has been since that picture was taken. Hard to believe that that little four year old girl lived in Panama, Nicaragua, Greece and Romania since then. That she has visited Mexico, Croatia, Bulgaria, Moldova, Turkey, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo since then! What a year. And now she is five.
Both girls are still pushing for us to go to China. It’s been more than a year with China being the destination that they want to go to most. But Romania remains the place that they want to return to the most.
Today is the Brexit vote in the UK and most of the day was spent watching the catastrophe there. I was up until about four in the morning last night watching the opening polls. And I know that late morning here we were expecting to have the anticipated results. So the whole morning was just watching the real time vote updates online to see what districts had reported in.
We are very sad to see that the UK has voted (we parts of it, like England and Wales) to leave the European Union (someday, already by late today they were saying that they might stall for up to a decade before actually taking action on this vote.) This is the biggest political shake up of the last few decades, not since the fall of the Soviet Union has there been something this big changing how we view the world.
The day was pretty much taken over by Brexit analysis, news reading and such. Kind of in shock, just a bit, although I had predicted that this would be the outcome.
Wednesday. This evening the Tocco clan set up an outdoor movie theater with our traveling video projector and the new shed. The kids all loved getting to watch movies outside. I never got to see the outdoor theater all summer, but Dominica posted pictures online.
Tocco Theater
For lunch today dad and I went up to Peppermint’s in Avon and had lunch there with Jenny Case. I last saw Jenny at SpiceWorld in Austin last year.
Yesterday we dropped off dad’s car at the shop to get it looked at. The word came back that the car is dead, his suspension punched through the frame of the car and it cannot be repaired. He spent years getting this car picked out and he loves it. He’s going to be very sad if no one is able to fix it.
I talked to Art and he things that a high school friend of ours will likely be able to weld something together to fix it. So we are going to look into that.
