We were delighted to discover that the sun was out and that the dew was rapidly burning off of the grass.  This was a Godsend as we desperately needed to lay out just about everything that we had brought with us in order to dry it out before we could pack it to go back with us.  If we didn’t get everything dry this morning then we had to unpack everything at Dominica’s parents’ house, set the tent and everything back up, let it dry and then have her family pack it back up when it was all done.  That would have taken hours out of our afternoon which we did not have any of which to spare.

There wasn’t really any time to spare this morning and we spent every moment that we had available to us drying and packing the camping gear.  We let Madeline and Emily sleep as long as they could but for Emily that wasn’t long at all and for Madeline it was only until around nine.  The girls really had nothing to do this morning and we very, very bored.  We felt really bad but there was nothing that we could do to entertain them as we had to spend all of our time getting the camp packed.  They did spend a little time taking turns playing Cooking Mama on Dominica’s Nintendo DS, but that only killed so much time.

Somehow the car-top carrier actually got dry and we were able to pack everything into the car.  It was amazing that Dominica was able to figure out how to get everything back into the car.  I could never have packed the car like that.  Not having Oreo with us did make things quite a bit easier as we were able to use the space in the back seat that he had been using on the way down.

It was a quarter till one when we were finally able to check out and pull out of the campground.  Almost five hours of packing!  But we can’t complain as everything was dry (except for the towels) and everything was put away and packed into the car.  What a relief it was to have that all done.

After checking out we played a round of miniature golf for the girls as they had been so patient all morning with nothing to do.  Dominica was only able to play a couple of holes, though, as she started getting light headed from bending over so much trying to play so she had to stop.  Being pregnant is tough.

After the girls finished their game we drove on down to the town of Watkins Glen and stopped a the Burger King there to get a quick lunch.  We got to try out their new apple fries which are apples cut into the shape of french fries that come with a caramel sauce for dipping.  It is a great idea.  Far healthier than French fries and quite tasty.  I never liked Burger King’s French fries anyway so this is a great alternative for me that makes me far more likely to want to eat at Burger King.

After lunch we crossed the parking lot and we all got ice cream (or gellato for Dominica) from the ice cream shop that was located right there.  Then it was time to really get on the road.  So around two in the afternoon we finally set off for Frankfort.

This time the drive went well and we made good time through Ithaca, Cortland and Syracuse and up to Utica and Frankfort.  We arrived in Frankfort just in time for dinner so we hung around for just a little while and had the picnic at the Tocco’s that had originally been planned for yesterday before the rain made that pretty much impossible.

While we were there with the BMW 330Ci parked in the police station / municipal parking lot directly next to Dominica’s parents’ house another completely identical BMW pulled in and parked nose to nose with Dominica’s car.  We have never seen another BMW in Frankfort let alone a completely identical model with the same year, color, model and options and then to have them parked nose to nose on a Monday evening!  I ran out and took some pictures just to prove that it happened and ended up being outside at just the right time to see the other owner and to get to talk to him for a little bit about the car.  He does not live in Frankfort, as you can imagine.

We got the Chrysler 300M unpacked and packed up the BMW and were back on the road between six and seven in the evening.  The drive back down to Newark went well and we arrived at the apartment at Eleven80 before midnight.  We were completely exhausted by the time that we got home but still had to unload the car and walk Oreo.  Then Dominica went straight to bed but I was so wired from driving and walking the dog that I didn’t fall asleep until two in the morning.

We were all up around a quarter to seven this morning.  It isn’t always easy to sleep in when you are camping.  When camping you really get the feel for just how “shifted” normal life is from daylight hours.  The average person, at least here in the US, stays up long after the sun has gone down and does not get up until long after it has come up, but when camping you tend to go to bed right as the sun goes down and get up pretty much when it rises.  It shifts your schedule very quickly.

We got up and got dressed and spent some time trying to get the tent into as good of shape as we could muster given our limited supplies, space and experience.  Then, at eight, it was time to head to the “mess hall” for our buffet breakfast.  It is all you can eat eggs, pancakes, French toast, sausage, bacon, toast, bagels, muffins, English muffins, etc.  We were looking forward to a hearty breakfast after having mostly beans for dinner.

From the time that we woke up until after breakfast the rain held off.  It was quite warm and sunny which gave us a critical reprieve to get some repairs done on the tent although it was not possible to get anything really drying at all as the humidity was still in the ninteties.  It was just hot and muggy but at least we were able to shift things around and mop up some of the standing water.  That helped.

It was far too hot for Oreo to be left in the car and we were afraid to leave the campsite unattended even if Oreo could have been left there on his own.  So Dominica and Oreo stayed behind in the tent and slept for a few hours while I took the girls back to the swimming pool so that they could swim some more.  The pool is really great and the girls just love it.  We couldn’t have gotten a better pool for them.  It is big and spacious but not so big as to be dangerous and not so many people using it as to be a problem.  It is three feet deep in the shallow end and five feet deep in the deep end so it is pretty safe that way as well.

I took the girls to swim at twenty after nine but discovered that the pool didn’t open until ten.  So we walked back to the camp and told Dominica but then decided that we would just hang out at the pool and wait for it to open as it was all muddy at the tent.  It started to rain this morning just after breakfast, sometime between eight thirty and nine in the morning.  So we were already wet just from the walking and the girls were getting pretty muddy as everything was dirt and had been wet all night.

The girls swam from ten o’clock in the morning, when the pool opened, until about noon when it was time for us to get ready to meet the Doty/Tocco clan at Watkins Glen State Park – just a few minutes away from the KOA where we were staying.  The swimming was very important as the girls were pretty bored after all of the time spent setting up the camp, cooking dinner, dealing with the rain, long drive to get to Watkins Glen, etc.

Just as we were finishing our swim Dominica instant messaged me from the tent to tell us that the rain was coming down pretty hard and that the tent was leaking pretty badly.  So we raced bask to help out.  There was only so much to do, though, and the tent just got rather damp.

Around noonish, I don’t remember the exact time, we drove down to Watkins Glen State Park at the south entrance to meet up with Dominica’s family who were meeting us there for a picnic.  It went from raining steady to really pouring once we got to the picnic area.  It seem to really start just as we arrived.

It only took a minute of the heavy rain and the flooding parking lot before everyone decided that eating outside was a lost cause and that other options would have to be investigated.  We could not use the picnic pavilion at the park because it was already reserved.  So we gave up on Watkins Glen State Park and drove down to the Seneca lakefront park near downtown Watkins Glen and looked for a picnic area there that we could use, but there was no such luck.  We took just seconds too long in getting there and the last picnic pavilion was taken just as we arrived.

Dominica and I had seen a family restaurant in town right on route 14 that had looked nice so we talked everyone in to eating there.  So lunch was at Savard’s Family Restaurant.  It was sad because so much effort was put into the picnic and now we weren’t even able to all sit together as a family because there were about fourteen of us and we had to be split between tables.  The food was good and we had a nice time but it wasn’t the big “get together” that we had hoped to have been able to have had.

The original plan was for the girls and whatever adults were interested to go swimming in the Watkins Glen State Park Olympic sized pool but because of the rain most everyone decided that they didn’t want to do that and the girls were indifferent as they could just go back to the campground to swim in their indoor, heated pool.

We did decide that it was just too warm and too wet to have Oreo with us so we let him go back to Frankfort ahead of us with Dominica’s parents.  It was very sad to send him away as he really, really loves camping but it has been a lot of work trying to take care of him and with the rain we really can’t handle anything extra.

We decided that I should do some swimming which, since Oreo returned home, is an option because Dominica can be the “lifeguard” on duty instead of me.  At least one adult has to be “on deck” at all times so I haven’t even had the option of swimming until now.  So we hit the Watkins Glen Super Walmart and picked up some additional towels and two swimsuits for me (they were on sale, just $7.50!)

We went back to the KOA and surveyed the damage.  Surprisingly, even in the crazy rain and wind that we had while we were away the tent was really no worse off than it was before we left.  Pheww, what a relief.

We all changed and headed for the pool.  It was around four in the afternoon when the girls finally got into the pool to start swimming again.  I got in right away as well and this is probably by first time swimming since Dominica and I belonged to the YMCA in Ithaca in 2002!  I ended up swimming with the girls for almost three solid hours.  I got out for a little while and Dominica swam for a bit but she can’t throw the girls around and do fun pool games, being pregnant, so they were pretty bored with her in the pool.  We practically had the pool to ourselves all evening.  There were other people using it but not very many.

The girls started to get tired, and hungry, around eight.  They got in at least three and a half hours of pool time which was awesome.  It really wore them, and me, out.  I was pretty sore by the time that I was getting out of the pool.

We went to the campground office and ordered some pizzas for dinner.  After last night we had decided that we are taking the easy route for food today.  No cooking at all.  They had actually stopped making pizza early because they didn’t have enough people but we made boo-boo kitty faces and the owner came over and cooked pizzas for us.  We got some ice cream while we waited.  Under more normal conditions we could have had pizza delivered to the tent site which would be really cool.

We ate out pizza, it was around nine or nine thirty, at the picnic table at our campsite.  The camp was extremely quiet tonight.  There is almost no one staying at the KOA as it is a Sunday night and most people left this morning.  Last night there were loud parties going on and it bothered a lot of people.  Tonight it was all but silent.

After dinner I made an attempt at starting a campfire but had no luck.  It wasn’t exactly a serious attempt but more a chance to burn all of our paper product trash as kindling and a feeble attempt at drying out our water-logged fire wood that sat out all last night and all day today.

Our camp neighbours, who live in New Jersey but are originally from Belfast, took pity on us and brought us dry firewood and a firestarter thing that fired the whole thing right up.  They didn’t want to see the girls go without s’mores on their first time camping in New York!

The fire got going in no time and I tended to that while Dominica worked to dry the tent using our towels and to get it sleepable for tonight.  By late evening the rain had stopped and we were starting to make headway on the tent.  It was much cooler tonight too – Min and I had to break out our sleeping bag for the first time.

Around ten we cooked s’mores.  Well, I cooked s’mores.  The girls really weren’t too interested in getting down and roasting marshmallows and Dominica sure wasn’t going to be bending down to cook them being five months pregnant.  The s’mores turned out pretty well, I think.  We are very thankful for friendly camping neighbours and their supplies.

We got the girls off to bed between ten thirty and eleven at night.  Dominica started working on getting everyone ready for bed back at nine when we had finished eating.  She did so much work tonight!  She and I were not able to finally turn in until a bit after midnight which was awful as we were just completely exhausted by that point.

Just before going to bed, while doing some work on packing things into the car, we discovered that the car-top carrier had somehow taken on water and had a gallon or two of water trapped in its lining!  What a disaster.

We did the best that we could to position the car-top carrier in such a way that it would drain during the night in the hopes that we could salvage it in the morning.  Because the water was trapped in the liner we had no way to open the carrier to drain it let alone dry it.  Tomorrow is going to be interesting.

Dominica and I were so stressed that after going to bed we had a really hard time falling asleep.  Everything went so poorly and there is so much more work to do tomorrow – especially with everything being wet and the car-top carrier possibly being useless – that we felt completely overwhelmed.  We were very worried that we just would not be able to get the site packed up.  We are supposed to be checked out by noon.  Then we have to drive to Frankfort with the girls and drop them off.  Then we unload all of this stuff, again, and load up the BMW that is at Min’s parents’ house.  Get Oreo and then drive back to Newark.  It is going to be such a long day.

Around one in the morning Dominica and I heard a sound outside of the tent.  We have the porch area wide open (but screened) so I could see out into the night to some extent.  We had a white garbage bag out by the road that would be picked up in the morning.  The KOA has garbage collection each morning and you just sit your trash out by the “road” just like you do at your house.  I looked carefully and noticed that the bag was moving away from us.

I told Dominica “Our trash appears to be leaving!”  So she grabbed the Colemand LED flashlight and her glasses.  She got ready with her glasses looking out the door and I turne the flashlight onto the garbage bag.  It turns out that we had a skunk looking for the left over pizza!

We were very fortunate that the skunk didn’t rip the bag all apart and make a huge mess.  It just made a tiny hole, probably ate more than it could handle for the night, and left us.

We slept in a bit this morning in the hopes of being rested for our trip.  But we were awake far earlier than we had hoped and only had a moderately long night.  Not enough to catch up on anything – just enough to hold our ground.

Getting the car packed was a major ordeal.  Fortunately Dominica’s father did the bulk of the packing.  We are borrowing her parents’ Chrysler 300M with their Thule roof top carrier to fit all of the camping supplies.  It is an incredible amount of stuff.  Far more than I had thought that we were going to be taking for two nights of camping.

We didn’t think that we needed to be in a hurry today so we took our time and relaxed a bit.  It was around one, I think, when we left Frankfort.  A normal trip from Frankfort to Watkins Glen takes less than three hours so we were expecting to arrived before six.  That seemed like it would be plenty of time.

We ended up getting stuck in completely stopped traffic on interstate 81 south of Syracuse.  Traffic was really awful and we sat there for an extremely long time without really moving.  All movement appeared to be coming from traffic compressing and not from people getting through.  Dominica, being pregnant, really needed to get to a restroom and this was causing a bit of a panic.

We decided that jumping off of 81 a the first available exit was the only move that made any sense.  So we exited at Preble and went south on 281 towards Cortland.  Unfortunately, this didn’t work out any better.  After about two miles we ended up in an “as far as the eye can see” line of cars that were not really moving either.  We sat there for a very long time before getting a chance to take a random side road.

We ate at the first restaurant that we were able to find, which ended up being a pizza place in Homer.  Finally Dominica was able to use a restroom.  It was a completely emergency at this point.  I have never seen traffic stop like this out in the country on two mostly unrelated roads like this before.  It was very strange.

It was so hot today, well into the nineties, that while we ate the car had to be left running with the air conditioning on full blast with blankets in the windows just to keep Oreo cool enough.  We had to sit so that we could watch the car all through lunch.  At least we had a chance to get some food while we were stuck.

While we were eating it suddenly began to downpour.  Oreo’s blanket was keeping the sun off of him and instantly became soaked.  First traffic issues and then our first big rain and something that we needed for the trip getting wet.  We should have guessed that things were going to be rough at this point.  At least we had the A/C running and didn’t have any windows open as we normally would have done or the entire interior of the car would have been drenched.  It was a lot of rain that came down.

By the time that we were done eating, we had lost just short of two hours because of traffic delays!  Our moderately late day had become extremely late.  We hurried on to Watkins Glen making as good of time as possible.  We never did definitely find out what either delay was.  Both were quite strange.

It was around six thirty when we arrived at the KOA in Watkins Glen, if I remember correctly.  It was quite late considering that we needed to set up the camp site after arriving.  We got checked in and drove out to our camp site, E103.  It was one of the last sites left as the campground is, I believe, full tonight.

It took us a while to get the tent set up.  Because we arrived so late we had the “all thats left” campsite that didn’t have any large grassy space on which to put the tent.  We made due with using some rocky space under the porch area and getting as much as we could onto the grass.  I destroyed several of our yellow, plastic Coleman tent stakes trying to secure the tent to rocky ground.  I beat the mallet so hard that it was starting to come apart.

It was incredibly hot and I was just burning up by the time that we finally got the tent errected.  Madeline and Emily were definitely bored out of their minds after the unexpectedly long car ride and then sitting for an hour or so as we tried to put the camp site together.

We were quite obviously extremely novice at camp-setup and our E104 site neighbours stopped by to see if we were going to be alright and offered some assistance in getting the site put together, but we managed, more or less, on our own.  It took a long time and we were really exhausted by the end, but we did it ourselves.

There was a lot of “little things” that needed to be done to get the camp site really ready so Dominica got to work on that with Oreo sleeping in the tent on the air mattresses while I took Madeline and Emily to the indoor pool to go swimming.  Swimming was really the only fun activity for them all day.  It was a lot of travel and work for just an hour or two of swimming.  I didn’t swim but just sat on the side as a lifeguard.  We swam until it was time for the pool to close at nine.

The girls and I stopped at the campground store and got ice cream for ourselves and Dominica and delivered it back to the camp site.  Dominica did a ton of setup work while we were gone and now it was very dark. She cooked us franks and beans for dinner which was very tough as she had all kinds of problems using the camp stove.  She and I settled for just beans as cooking veggie dogs too was deemed to be far too much effort.  We were completely exhausted already.

Dominica washed up the dished and I made an attempt to start a fire but nothing would start.  We weren’t planning on a fire tonight but thought that we would at least try.  It was so hot, though, that having a fire was not ideal.

It was around ten when we all got to bed.  We were exhausted and very hot.  I was covered in sweat from it being so hot all evening.  We were very glad that we had the ceiling and window fans for the tent.  It made all of the difference.

While are day was pretty rough, we were very impressed with the KOA campground (kampground.)  Everything was clean and nice and there are a lot of ammenities.  Quite impressive.  It really is a little like a resort.

The rain started around eleven.  We knew that rain was expected tomorrow but were not expecting to get any tonight.  This is not what we had wanted.

Dominica and I both got up and quickly “battened down the hatches” to seal up the tent.  We did okay for the first while but it rained all night getting pretty heavy in the middle of the night.  Eventually we started getting leaks and water starting collecting.  We had to deal with that a bit during the night.  The beds stayed dry mostly but the floor was a mess.  Lots to deal with tomorrow

We had been really hopeful that we would at least have no rain tonight.  Now our whole weekend is going to be driven by the rain.

The one thing that we realized is a problem with us camping is that Dominica has to make several trips to the restroom during the night since she is pregnant and being far away from the restroom isn’t very convenient for her.  Oreo also seems to like the proximity of the great outdoors and chooses to go out in the middle of the night causing additional disruption.

We did get very good sleep, however, and were well rested and very happy in the morning.  The tent allowed us so much fresh air – not like any camping that I had ever attempted before.  And for just the two of us (and the dog) the tent is incredibly spacious.  I think that we are very likely to attempt camping on our own in the very near future.  Oreo would definitely enjoy that.  Maybe we will try camping in Maine or Canada although there are lots of state parks that can work as well.

We have most of the gear that we need.  That new electrical stuff, which will be cheap, a power adapter and some organizers for the inside of the tent should do the trick.  We need places to put our stuff that are up off of the floor.  We will be taking “camping chairs” as well to set up in our porch area which we didn’t use at all this time.  Other than that we seemed to be pretty well stocked.  We are not attempting to cook in any way this time so there is a lot of potential problems in that area that we have yet to tackle.

We left the tent set up as we are going to be using it again tonight.  We had wanted to go to the Omega Grill in Geneseo for breakfast this morning but we got up a little too late as I was scheduled to work at ten in the morning.

I worked for several hours taking up the bulk of the middle of the day.  Since we couldn’t go out for breakfast or lunch we ordered pizza from Davis’ Farm Market in Pavilion and dad went down and picked it up.

After lunch the Ralstons came up with Settlers and we played for a while and visited.  They had just a small, mid-afternoon window to see us so we didn’t get to hang out for very long.  Michael went out with his Nintendo DS and played in the screened porch area of the tent.  That is something that we are going to attempt to bring next weekend when we do real camping – our Nintendo DS and Sony PSPs.  That way there is definitley stuff to do while in the tent.  We have games for both systems that we have never even played!

The Ralstons left around four in the afternoon and I worked for another hour or so until we drove up to Geneseo to meet my Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo at the Shang Hai restaurant for dinner.  Then, after dinner, we came back down to Peoria and drove down to the new construction on NY Route 63. We walked around the new intersection to check out how the work is progressing.  It is really coming along quickly.

We looked at about 500 slides from around 1982 to 1984 that dad had mostly from the construction of his house.  Dominica had never seen pictures of what the farm looked like with the old 1904 farmhouse and the cabana, swimming pool, etc.  It was pretty interesting.  Now she understands what a strange childhood I had.  That old house was really crazy.  Dad and I are trying to figure out how to get all of those old slides converted to digital so that we can get them up on line.  Now that the baby is coming it is more important than ever to get all of that history somewhere before it is too late.

We camped back out in the tent again tonight.  Oreo is used to it already and went right on out and climbed on in.  This is his new favorite place to sleep.  He is really exhausted tonight after spending the day playing on the farm.

We left Frankfort to head to dad’s house just after Dominica’s parents headed out to Albany.  It was probably just before three when we hit the road with the BMW loaded down with camping gear to test out this weekend.

We met dad at the Omega Grill for dinner around six but the grill was closed for the holiday so we went over to Denny’s instead where my cousin’s friend from high school (York) was working as the hostess.  The same friend that I once sat next to at a McDonald’s near Philly completely by coincidence.

After dinner we went back to dad’s house and got right to work setting up the camping equipment in the back yard.  This was the first time for either of us to really be putting up a tent so it was a bit of an experience but it went pretty smoothly.  No real hassles.  It took about twenty or twenty-five minutes to set it all up.

We had a lot of fun trying out all of the new gear like the ceiling fans and lighting systems.  The built in Coleman florescent lighting system in our tent is really impressive.  It works by remote control – which is great for finding your tent in the dark – and is a regular 15W bulb so it is really bright for such a small space.  You can work in the tent just like it was a house.

The tent is really well ventilated as well with the top and sides being almost completely wide open.  The only real disappointment is that the screened porch area does not have a “floor” so it can’t be used as a part of the main tent.  We were happy to discover that the tent has a handy electrical cord port to make powering the tent even easier since we have to have the CPAP in it.

Our next bits of camping gear will be “in tent” organizers to put our clothes and things on as well as an AC to DC “power system” so that the overhead light is powered via the AC rather than off of batteries.  That will make the packing smaller and lighter and cheaper too and let us use the light all that we want without feeling like we are wasting batteries.  We will likely also get a chargeable D battery system so that we can just charge batteries as they are needed in the tent rather than buying tons of expensive D batteries and throwing them away.  What a waste that can be.

We watched a little television with dad tonight before heading out to the yard to go to bed.  We didn’t want to be out there early at all because the yard is covered in Japanese beetles which are perfectly content to land on your head and to get all over the tent.  We got to see an episode of Eli Stone which dad has been telling us about for a while.  It is his favorite new show, I believe.

Around eleven, Dominica, Oreo and I went on out to the tent to try our first night of camping in our new tent.  This is Dominica’s first ever night sleeping in a tent and my first time since June, 1994 when Eric and I went camping in Pennsylvania.

Amazon reports that our huge collection of new camping equipment has arrived at Dominica’s parents’ house already and is waiting for us to pick up tonight and to take to dad’s house tomorrow to test out before doing some “real”camping next weekend in Watkins Glen, New York with our nieces. We are camping at the Watkins Glen KOA and not at the state park as we need electric and wireless Internet access. I have to have my CPAP so there is nothing to be done about the power requirement.

Today’s shipment includes a queen size sleeping bag for Dominica and I, two pink and faux-fur sleeping bags for our nieces, a really nice Coleman LED lantern, LED and Xenon wide beam flashlight, an enamel-ware settings set, air compressor for tires and air mattresses, two wall mount Coleman fans and our screened Weathermaster Elite tent with built in, remote-controlled lighting system. This is seriously luxurious camping. We also have one “regular height” queen size air mattress as well as our ceiling mount chandelier/ceiling fan combination unit already in the car, ready to go, as well as our tarpoline. The only thing that we have to get yet is our second queen sized air mattress. This new one will be a double height unit to make getting in and out much easier.

Everyone that we know (and that Dominica’s mother knows at work) are trying to get on the waiting list to buy our camping gear once we discover that we don’t like camping   This will be Dominica’s first ever time camping in a tent so we will see how this goes.  I still see all of this as a cost savings over anything else that we would have done so it isn’t as bad as it sounds.

I wasn’t really busy all day but the day was long because so many people were out today. I ended up working a twelve hour day and we weren’t able to leave Newark to head to Frankfort until about eight in the evening.

Traffic on the New York State Thruway was pretty heavy and it took us much longer than usual to get from Newark to Frankfort with the worst bits obviously being nearer to the city.  We stopped at a Thruway rest stop McDonalds to get dinner and save time but, of course, everyone else had the same idea and it took over forty minutes to get our food.  The poor McDonald’s crew looked like they were about to break down and cry from there being so many people in line.

What makes no sense to me is with McDonald’s having an almost hour long waiting line for food why all the other restaurants in the rest stop decided that closing up at regular time was financially advantageous to them.  I would have stayed open and taken the constant McD’s overflow if it was my money.  People often talk about “greedy corporations” but, in reality, corporations are normally a bit more lazy than greedy.  Had a restaurant owner been present rather than a corporate manager those restaurants would have been open for sure.

For the last half of the drive I listened to Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood in their “new” poscast Stack Overflow (episode twelve.)  Dominica secretly listened pretending to sleep and near the end surprised me with the declaration that she enjoyed listening to Stack Overflow because it was two really intelligent people.  Apparently she missed who it was doing the show.  She was shocked to learn that she knew Joel (not in person) and had read some of his articles.  One of the few IT personalities that she knows by name and reputation.  So this is a good sign that we might have found a subversive way to sneak IT learning in without overt objection.

It was almost one in the morning when we finally arrived in Frankfort.

Dominica and I both slept in a bit this morning before getting up and doing a bunch of apartment cleaning that was very much over due.  No one has been visiting us recently and we have been letting the apartment go quite a bit as our schedules have been pretty busy and I have not been working from home as much as usual which always leads to a lack of time for housework.

We found out last night that a new and as yet unnamed Boston Terrier puppy, just nine weeks old, has moved onto our floor at Eleven80.  We haven’t met the new puppy yet but expect to do so soon.  There are now three full time Boston Terrier residents in the building but Oreo is the only mature one.

Around noon Ramona and Winni came by to visit with the intent of playing a small Dungeons and Dragons game.  We haven’t seen either of them in at least two months.  Winni is living in New Hampshire now, but is moving to Frederick, Maryland in a few weeks, and Ramona recently moved from the Ironbound, here in Newark, to Flushing in Queens.

The idea today was to play a quick, little D&D Fourth Edition adventure which Winni had put together just so that we could test out the fourth edition rules, but we didn’t have a lot of time in which to play as they needed to get over to Ramona’s old apartment to deal with some final packing and stuff and none of us had seen in each other in quite a while so we just spent the afternoon visiting.

We ordered in lunch from Nino’s as pretty much everyone was in the mood for some Italian.  We ate and opened a bottle of Miles Wine Cellars 2005 Cabernet Frank which everyone really enjoyed.

Winni and Ramona left around six and I went to work on a few things.  Almost right away while attempting to get my dual monitors working on my new OpenSUSE 11 workstation I did something that caused the root directory to just vanish.  So there was little that I could do but to install again.  So I kicked off another install.  Crappy.

Dominica and I have our nieces coming to visit us sometime in the next couple weeks and we are attempting to figure out what we are going to do.  The original plan was to go see “The Little Mermaid” on Broadway but the cost was going to be astronomic – like close to $600 or more – and we have heard that the show isn’t very good.  We thought about doing the Bronx Zoo and the science center but Dominica doesn’t think that she could spend a day walking at the Bronx Zoo.  We considered spending the weekend at a resort in the Poconos but that was really expensive as well.

Our final idea was to take the girls camping.  Dominica has never been camping (not actual camping) and I have not gone since going t Allegheny National Forest near Warren, Pennsylvania in June, 1994.  I have never owned a tent of my own and things have improved a lot since Eric and I went all of those years ago.  We thought that camping would be pretty expensive but we compared it to the price of going to see a show on Broadway or to a night or two in the Poconos and it turns out that buying all new, top end camping gear would be significantly cheaper – plus it is all reusable.

We hunted around and the best Coleman tent is only $175 from Amazon ($250 MSRP) and the types of sleeping bags that we would need are very cheap.  Some nice LED lights and tent fans (to keep cool) all came up to being very inexpensive.  After looking at the cool gadgets to get Dominica got really excited about camping and has been going crazy shopping for cool camping stuff for the last two days.

We were hoping to be able to camp at a New York State state park but have not been able to find any camp sites that will work for us.  We absolutely need electrical hookup (cheesy for real camping, I know) because I cannot sleep without my CPAP so there is no way around that requirement.  We almost didn’t think of that and might have booked a camp site without power which would have been disastrous, but since we know now that we have to have it it means that we know ahead of time that we can take the laptop and watch movies at night and charge our phones and stuff.  It’s not exactly “roughing it” camping but that really isn’t an option at this point in our lives anymore and that wasn’t quite what Dominica wanted to do anyway.  It does mean, though, that we can never camp at Handsome Lake again which I would have liked to have been able to have done again.

So since the state parks aren’t available to us in July when we need to go we decided to look at KOA (Kampgrounds of America) and many of them come with power and wireless Internet access which is extremely cool.  That means that we can keep in full contact with the outside world and that I don’t even have to go off of being “on call” for the weekend.  I will be able to work as usual while camping giving us a lot more flexibility to do this more often.  Plus, I think, that camping with this level of amenities makes camping a lot more attractive to us in general.  We just don’t live lives that allow for us to completely break contact with the outside world.  We won’t have the camera problems that I have had in the past either since we will always have the car near by in which to store valuables where they can be locked up safe.

So the plan is that sometime in the next two to three weeks that the four of us will head out into the “wilderness” to go camping.  Dominica is even excited about camping recipes and cooking over an open fire!

Tomorrow morning we have a doctor’s appointment in the morning.  I will be working from home before the appointment and Dominica will be off until after lunch.  So she just has a half day.  I will just be “out” for about two hours.