New York

Here's an upfront warning: This is going to be one doozy of a post so you might want to go to the bathroom and get something to drink before you start reading :)

We left at around 5:45 on Sunday the 18th, stopped for gas at the Kwik Trip right off the highway and then headed south. Throughout the entire trip we had fabulous driving weather and fabulous weather all around. Sunday was pretty much just a driving day. A few missed exits in Chicago made things a little interesting, but all in all it was an uneventful drive. We got to Jamestown around 6:30. Set up camp there, had some dinner, and called it a night pretty early.

Monday morning Adam forgot to save the new alarm time so we were rudely awakened at 5:45 by the incredibly loud alarm on his cell phone. Since there was no way we were going to go back to sleep after that we got up, showered, and went for a walk around the neighborhood. My mom was downstairs when we returned so we headed off to Chatauqua for the morning, stopping at various little places along the way. We toured Chautauqua for awhile and I think my mom was pretty much oblivious to the fact that Adam and I were bored out of our minds. Good exercise though. We then headed out to Panama to check out the rock formations there. Adam had fun climbing all over the rocks and we all got a workout on the uneven rocks and tricky tree roots. We stopped at a cute restuarant place called "Julie's" in Panama. We headed back up toward Chautauqua to go to Webbs to get some goat milk fudge. Then we headed south of Jamestown to a cider place. I got a funky looking gourd, Adam got some New York maple syrup, and we all got to feed the goats they keep on site for goat milk fudge (if we had known they had that we could have saved some time and gotten it there instead of at Webbs. Oh well.) After all of this we headed back to my mom's house and spent the evening there.

Tuesday morning we headed into Canada to Niagara Falls. Adam was originally pumped to be able to say he was going 100 km/hr until he realized that this translated into just over 60 mph. Luckily it turns out that Canadians don't follow their speed limits any more than Americans do. We spent perhaps an hour at the Falls after we figured out the whole parking thing. It was a great day and the mist was really in full swing. But really, how long can you stand there and watch water go over a rock? We headed back to Marineland, a zoo/aquarium/amusement park we had passed on the way up to the Falls. We spent the rest of the morning and the better part of the afternoon there. Adam got a lot of really cool pictures so be sure to check out the photobucket album. It's a really cute park. It has a medieval theme so the buildings are castles and renaissance music is piped out from unknown sources throughout the park (think the singing rocks at Great America.) It's currently undergoing a whole bunch of construction and it was an awful lot of walking, but it was a fun time. We headed back to Jamestown and got back pretty much around the time my mom's students were done for the day.

Wednesday was the long day. We left Jamestown and headed up to Buffalo for the day. The first stop was the Original Kazoo Factory in Eden. We checked out the museum and factory and Adam even made his own kazoo. After arriving in Buffalo we headed to the zoo. Apparently Buffalo has this budget crisis thing going on and all the good animals got shipped off to parts unknown or something. I have to say I was pretty unimpressed with the whole thing. Parts of it were under construction and the rest of it was kind of shoddy. Once again Adam got some great pictures of the animals that WERE there so check them out. After standing in line for damn near 15 minutes to get lunch at Wendy's we headed to the Museum of Science. Once again, I was completely unimpressed. There was a pretty interesting exhibit about pulleys, but other than that it was not worth writing home about. Since we still had time before we had to meet Catherine we drove out to East Aurora to find Fowler's Chocolate. Picked up some good (but bad for you) stuff there and headed back to the SUNY campus to pick Catherine up for dinner. We ate at some Chinese restaurant (pretty good food), had a itsy bitsy birthday hurrah for my mom and then went back to Jamestown.

My sister wrote about this on her website and I think what she wrote merits a response. Since she doesn't blog, I can't link, so I'll paste the text here:

"My sister and her 6'7" "boy toy" Adam came out to NY to spend a few days with my mother. They managed to spend about an hour and a half with me, nearly all of which was at a restaurant eating dinner. Martha didn't speak to me, and though Adam tried, a Wisconsin native who works at Wal-Mart and whose main claim to fame is that he's shacking up with my apparently estranged sister is not likely to win me over in an hour and a half. Why is our family so pathetically ridiculous? Anyhow, it was weird. I did get some good Chinese leftovers out of it, though."

Now, let's go through this one issue at a time.

1. Adam is not my "boy toy." He is my "boyfriend", and if things go according to plan, will someday be my husband. I dislike the connotation that "boy toy" carries.

2. We only spent an hour and a half with her because of her busy schedule. If she had had the time we would have been willing to do other things with her, but as it happened, a birthday dinner for our mom seemed to be the only option.

3. She's right - I barely spoke to her. This is because she was generally pretty caught up in talking to our mother about things that I was not interested in. Why be rude an interrupt their conversation when I really have nothing to say to her anyway?

4. True, Adam works at Wal-Mart but this is not his real job. He works there part time in the photo lab to make some extra money. His real job is at Cisco Systems in sales. He recently won a whole ton of awards during their fiscal year-end banquet. While there is nothing wrong with working at Wal-Mart, I think it's unfair to mention it in a way that is obviously meant as a put-down. Saying he works at Wal-Mart would be like saying that (when I still worked there) I work at K-mart. Both my K-Mart and his Wal-Mart jobs were/are secondary and shouldn't be put ahead of our real careers.

5. We are not "shacking up." At the time of this dinner we weren't even living together.

6. He had no intention of trying to win her over. Why would he? I'm the one he should be concerned about getting to like him. And if he had no way to do it in the alloted time (as she states) why should he even try? I'm not quite sure what she was looking for here.

7. I don't know why our family is "pathetically ridiculous," but I sure enjoy being around Adam's family a whole lot more than around my family. At least they don't criticize my life choices and act incredibly pretentious when, in reality, their shit stinks just as much as mine does. Being around most members of my family just reminds me how much I like the fact that most of them live far, far away from me. I was so glad that he was there. That way I didn't feel so completely excluded when my mother and sister proceeded to have conversations that were of no interest to me. I think I fell more in love with him every day of this trip.

I was really ready to go ahead and give my sister a "not as bad as I'd expected" marking for this trip. This journal entry ruined that though. I can't wait until May!

Anywho, we left on Thursday morning to head to Canton and the Pro Footbal Hall of Fame. I was kind of bored, but Adam appeared to enjoy it and I got a Vikings shirt out of the deal. We headed back across Ohio and got about halfway through Indiana before calling it a night. After looking for some Notre Dame merchandise unsuccessfully, we had some dinner at the bar and restaurant attached to the hotel we were staying at. After dinner we had a few beers and played some darts. I think I won once. :) Our hotel room kind of reminded me of home: the toilet ran constantly because the stupid plunger thing was retarded. After fighting with the narrow shower in the morning, we had breakfast at Perkins and headed back to Wisconsin.

Since we returned so much earlier than we had anticipated (we got back to Oshkosh around 1:30), we decided to pick the keys up Friday afternoon and get the furniture moved into the new place Friday evening. I've spent all of yesterday and today packing up the rest of my apartment and I think I have about one more trip out to Neenah and I'll be done. Needless to say, my body is bruised and sore and I really, really, really hate moving. It doesn't help that Adam has been at work all day yesterday and today. Oh well. I'm almost done. Then I get to clean again before I get rid of this apartment. That should be a blast.

Well, that's all I've got for now.