vacation Archives - Page 3 of 6 - Ramblin' with Roger

Letchworth State Park: Grand Canyon of the East

Mary Jemison eventually lived in western New York on the Genesee River.

Letchworth State Park, July 17-18, 2016

When we traveled on vacation from northeast Ohio towards the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, it was the longest time we spent continually in the car. So we were rather spent when we finally got to what has been described as the Grand Canyon of the East. In fact, by the time we drove into Letchworth State Park late that Sunday afternoon, there was no one collecting money. So we drove around, then got out of the car several times, and looked at the amazing scenery for a bit.

But we needed to get to our hotel before it got too late. So we came back the next day. As it turns out, because I’m 62 or over, with an NYS driver’s ID, we were able to get in for free!

The history of the area was fascinating to me. “The park is the present-day site of the grave of Mary Jemison, a Scots-Irish immigrant pioneer who was captured at the age of 12 from central Pennsylvania by a French and Shawnee raiding party during the French and Indian War. She was soon adopted by a family of Seneca people and eventually lived in western New York on the Genesee River. She had become thoroughly assimilated and chose to live with the Seneca for the rest of her long life.”

I can look at waterfalls for a good while, and we saw two of the three major ones in the park. Some of the picnic tables were made from stone. The playgrounds were nice, and my traveling companions liked posing in the giant chairs. Oh, and it had at least one antique: a working payphone.

Truth is, though, we didn’t come close to fully taking advantage of all the amenities, We didn’t get to the William Pryor Letchworth Museum. We didn’t walk on any of the “66 miles (106 km) of hiking trails” use the “two large swimming pools, cabins, campsites for tents, trailer sites with dumping stations, and horse-riding trails. Activities within the park include hiking, biking, fishing, whitewater rafting and kayaking, geocaching, and hunting.”

This means only one thing: we need to come back, and spend more time!

Olin Family International Reunion 2016

This circular proof literally made me shake my head.

Olin Family International Reunion 2016, Saybrook, OH – July 15-17, 2016

After we left the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, we headed east on I-90 . The Wife wanted to stop in Geneva-on-the-Lake, so we did, enjoying a great view of Lake Erie and eating at a fairly new restaurant in town.

We traveled to the hotel, and then the reunion. I’d been saying we were going to Ashtabula; well, we were in that county, but actually at the Saybrook United Methodist Church. About 65 of us gathered over the period from the Friday evening ice cream social to the Sunday morning brunch, coming from California, Washington state, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ontario, and probably other states besides New York and Ohio.

In fact, at least five folks I had seen only the weekend earlier, including my parents-in-law.

Practically as I entered the door, Kay Olin Johnson corralled me. She had something to show me, an article in the Jamestown (ND) Sun titled “Talks to focus on ancestry search and Princess Diana. “There was an online posting on June 5, 2011, by Roger Green, whose wife and daughter are related to the Spenser [sic] line, and who is author of ‘Ramblin’ with Roger: a Librarian’s Life.’

“Green introduced a Fargo lady named Kay Johnson, whom he met at his wife’s family reunion of the Olins/Spensers.”

I laughed hysterically because it was clear that the reporter was vetting Kay’s bona fides through my blog when much of the information about the Spencer line I had gotten from Kay! This circular proof literally made me shake my head.

As is true with lots of organizations, recruitment of new members is key. Reaching out to people who may not know they’re Olins, through social media, is a key tactic.

On Saturday, we shared historical finds and identifying genealogical resources, including DNA testing; ate lunch; participated in a lengthy auction; had dinner; talked a lot; and watched the sunset on Lake Erie. This was a whole lot more fun than it sounds. And we talk WAY less about Diana than you might think.

I was particularly intrigued by one entrepreneurial woman who puts my ecological efforts to shame. She and her partner discover businesses that are tossing certain products, and they dumpster dive to find items that can be auctioned on eBay or sold for scrap. She was clearly brokenhearted when the stuff goes to the landfill, not primarily because she wants the revenue, but because those items will clog a landfill somewhere, not the planet she wants to leave to her young granddaughter.

We visited covered bridges, including one named for the Olins, and went to a cemetery where some Olins are buried, plus the folks in the Ashtabula Bridge Disaster of 1876.

The Daughter had a reasonably good time at the Olin Family International Reunion, assisting with the auction, playing with one of her cousins, previously unknown to her, and eating the free ice cream available all weekend, thanks to one of the tribe. That’s usually my gauge of a successful trip, how The Child fared.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame

The NFL was something I experienced with others, initially with my father.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016, Canton, Ohio

Last year, when we knew we would be going to the Olin Family Reunion in Ashtabula, Ohio, I proclaimed that one of the other activities I REALLY wanted to do is to visit the Pro Football Hall of Fame. This is football as in the American game, not what Americans call soccer.

I’m a sucker for a good HoF. I’ve been to the Basketball one in Springfield, MA with The Wife (and infant Daughter); the surprisingly enjoyable Horse Racing HoF in Saratoga Springs, NY, with The Wife; and the Baseball HoF in Cooperstown, NY, which I’ve been to several times, going back to my childhood.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame provided a very entertaining time for me, as I was captivated about the history, from the 1920s, with highlights from each decade. On one wall was the won-loss record of every team, current or defunct, for every season.

The social impact of the sport was on display, from the reintegration of the NFL in the 1940s to Joe Namath’s pantyhose commercial.

And checking out the information about the players was fun. It’s true that I don’t much follow the National Football League much these past several years, and couldn’t tell you who won the Super Bowl two or three years ago. But I could tell you who was in the first five of them.

The NFL was something I experienced with others, initially with my father, watching the New York Giants each week of the season, then various friends. (I remember specifically that a now-ex of mine fell on the black ice the day the Buffalo Bills came back from the largest playoff deficit ever.)

Alas, it wasn’t nearly as much fun for The Wife and The Daughter. They were on some Xbox, trying to play. But they know so little about the fundamentals of the game that they kept getting “delay of game” penalties.

In fact, the Daughter’s favorite thing was noticing this utility poll very near the building, and recognizing it as a goalpost.

We did get lunch there – it wasn’t outrageously expensive – and heard on the NFL newsfeed that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s four-game suspension would be reinstated. Good or bad news, depending on one’s rooting interests.

I recommend the Pro Football Hall of Fame for even the casual NFL fan or former fan, but not so much for those who don’t care about the game at all.

V is for Vermont

Pickleball is a sport easier to play than to explain.

All of my wife’s immediate family – her parents, her two brothers, their wives, the three daughters amongst them, and our nuclear threesome – spent several days together just before Labor Day at Smugglers’ Notch Resort near remote Jeffersonsville, VT about 40 miles northeast of Burlington. It’s a ski resort in the winter but has grown into a family-friendly summer resort.

Smugglers’ Notch namesake “comes from the smugglers of the early nineteenth century, who used the thick forest on the mountain range, and the caves and caverns along the Long Trail to transport illegal or embargoed goods across the Canadian border. The notch was most likely involved in bootlegging during the Prohibition-era of the 1920s, using the same caves as a cache for smuggled Canadian beer, wine, and spirits.”

We got there on a Sunday, the day before they switched to a modified fall schedule of events. The downside is that there was much confusion about the new rotation. For instance – and there were five or six examples like this – the Wife and I call up to book disc golf lessons at the appointed time, but no one there knows what we’re talking about.

The good news is the staff, to a person, was unfailingly polite and accommodating. An employee made a call and got us transportation to a location on the massive site, and a guy gave us – and only us, as it turned out – lessons.

Disc golf, BTW, is a flying disc game – think of series of differently-weighted Frisbees – the object which, similar to golf, “is to traverse a course from beginning to end in the fewest number of throws of the disc.” As it turns out, there are a few disc golf courses in our area, notably Central Park in Schenectady.

More crowded was the pickleball class, a sport easier to play than to explain. A standard pickleball court is the same size as a doubles badminton court, but we played in a modified tennis court. The net height is a yard, a little less than a meter. The paddle is smaller than a tennis racquet but larger than a ping-pong paddle, and more like the latter. The ball itself is like a wiffleball but smaller in diameter, and slightly heavier. It plays like a mixture of tennis and badminton.

The five days there also featured hikes, some reading, and, on two nights, visits to the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. It is a lovely setting. As someone almost said, a splendid time was had by all.

ABC Wednesday – Round 17

V-A-C-A-TION

Next year we’ll be away at least 11 days, and I’m actually looking forward to it. And dreading the return.

Jaquandor asked his readers: “How do you allocate your vacation time?

“What I mean is this: suppose you get, say, three weeks of vacation time a year. Do you take three entire weeks off? Or do you scatter the days off throughout the year by taking a three-day weekend here, a four-day weekend there, and so on?”

Here’s the truth: vacation is difficult for me.

When I worked at FantaCo (1980-1988), I always felt that if I left for too long, I’d come back to chaos. So when my boss insisted I use some of my time, I took off eight consecutive Wednesdays.

Taking off a day in the middle of the week actually had real advantages. I took care of banking, going to the post office, and other weekday stuff difficult to do on the weekdays. I saw a lot of movies. And the weekends were my own.

I have taken some vacations of a week or more in my current librarian job. But the last time I took off two full weeks was in 1998. The first week I visited my friend Sarah in Detroit, saw the Henry Ford and Motown museums, and saw the Tigers in their now razed stadium. I also went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

Week two, I was GOING to stay home, do a major cleaning and paper purging. But I ended up going to Washington, DC, trying out for the game show JEOPARDY! and ended up seeing a lot of the sights there.

I had a four-day weekend recently, and it was fine, but returning to work on Tuesday was DIFFICULT.

This past week, I was away with my family from Saturday-Thursday in Vermont. Yet I went to work on Friday (today), instead of attaching it to the following three-day Labor Day weekend, because coming back to the potential of 1,000 work emails was too daunting.

But next year, we’re trekking to northern Ohio, to go to a family reunion. The Daughter wants to go to the Rock Hall, which I wouldn’t mind visiting again. I want to go to see the Football Hall of Fame in Canton. It’ll be at least 11 days away, and I’m actually looking forward to it. And dreading the return.

BTW, per The Wife’s wishes, which make sense to me, I don’t mention when we’re going away on social media, only when we’ve returned.

Vacation – GoGo’s
Vacation-Connie Francis