Family & Friends

We left Ontario with some more wonderful memories of visits with family and friends........3 Thanksgiving dinners and many more fabulous meals, libations and conversations. We are fortunate to have so many people that we desire to be with even though time constraints limit our time with them and others that we didn't get together with on this trip.

Heading out of Toronto on Sunday we took the opportunity to go down memory lane. Our first stop was in West Hill at our old family home (the first one owned by my parents). It has been 35 years since I lived there but nothing has changed on the exterior of the house.........other than my memories of a decent sized hockey rink beside the house (before the carport was built) were proportionately misguided. Our next stop was in Port Hope at the farmhouse that her grandparents purchased in 1914 (built in the early 1900's). That house also looks just like it did when it was sold in 1986 except that the barn, large vegetable and flower gardens, and surrounding farmland have been replaced by a new community that surrounds the existing house, the only reminder that something special was once there.

Following an overnight visit at a cottage north of Kingston with Rhonda's girlfriend Diana and Mojo, her 220 pound English mastiff (a beautiful dog) we began our journey into the U.S. We drove through the Adirondack Mountains which seemed more like small hills compared to our Rocky Mountains. The fall colours were beautiful but it was very quiet with almost all of the campgrounds closed. Since it was overcast, cool & windy we kept driving to the southern edge where we spent the night in Lake George, a destination area in the summer but seemingly in hibernation when we arrived.

With a weather forecast of 20C on the coast we decided to drive straight thru to the coast this morning and we made it to Cape Cod by the early afternoon (the navigator won that round....for those that inquired about our planned destinations). I will provide more details of our east coast adventures in the next blog........right now we are working on understanding this strange Boston dialect that the locals seem to speak.