What inspired this years Epic journey was a request by my great aunt to take a few days and go to Cooperstown, NY. For anyone who doesn't know, this is where the Baseball Hall of Fame is located. It's a cute town with small shops, eateries and no real rush to get much done in a day. It went from there to adding a night in Buffalo for wings, Gettysburgh PA and then a baseball game in Pittsburgh. (As you can tell we are a baseball lovin family) Thus began the planning of vacation 2008. Since we were taking my Aunt Onie, we could not leave out Granny as well and since we had two older ladies with us, it was decided that we would be driving everywhere on this vacation. (Wonderful news to someone who works on planes and is used to hopping states in a few hours instead of a few days...)
So, to begin our adventure, we all met (minus Onie) at my parents house in Cincinnati. We packed up the van with all of our bags, and us, and headed off to Dayton. The plan was- Mom and Dad would take Onie to pick up the Rental Van (bigger, more leg room and equip'd with a DVD player) while we waited. Well, we sure did wait, 20, 30, 40 minutes. They finally arrived back to the house with a van smaller than ours without any DVD player. It seems there had been some miscommunication... the confusion being they did not have what we wanted, and it also seemed they had forgotten to clean up the car before handing it off to us. So, instead of packing up and heading on our way, all 6 of us went back to the airport to return the car. We finally packed up our van and headed out on our first day drive to Buffalo a few hours late.
We drove all day to Buffalo to check into our hotel room that evening and meet up with Dad's old college roommate + family for dinner that night. We were all excited to hit up The Anchor Bar, aka Home of the Buffalo Wing for wings and beer before hitting the sack for another long day of driving ahead of us.
Day 2: We hit the road again, bright and early, after a hotel breakfast. Luckily, we had spotted a Starbucks on the drive from dinner to the hotel. We stopped for morning coffee before hitting the highway to Cooperstown. (YAY!) Mom and Dad spotted a Black and White Cookie (they are obsessed with Seinfeld) and had to get one for Kyle.
We stopped throughout the drive at a few Rest stops... of course mom and dad had to read all of the signs everywhere in case they missed vital information about where we were. ;)
A few hours into the drive, we hit a storm- a hail storm. Usually, not a big deal... but my great aunt was freaking out! I felt so bad for her too, she hasn't really been out of her house in a bad storm for years so I could only imagine how scary it might be. I am in storms all the time for work (and not even on solid ground) so it felt like nothing to me but still we pulled over and let it pass by.
We finally made it to Cooperstown, safe and sound. My parents booked us at a hotel outside of Cooperstown, NY so we checked into our lovely home for the next few days and drove into town for dinner. (The drive in was so pretty!) We went down the main street to show Granny and Aunt Onie where the Baseball Hall of Fame sat and then we went looking for some grub. We found this cute little restaurant down by the lake!
They had a few cute choices for beer so we had to try the baseball themed beverages. Here is my Grandma taking a swig.
Dinner was really good! I had shrimp stuffed with crab.
We took a few photos around the restaurant and decided to call it a night to make sure we were ready to go for the next day. (It helped us to head back to the hotel early each night to watch the evenings of swimming and gymnastics in the Olympics!)
My crazy family!
More to come later!!!
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