Day 2: Albany to Buffalo, via Niagara Falls

Roughly 280 miles down, 6 hours or so, and we are enjoying a lovely evening in Orchard Park, NY.  It's 10pm and we're a bit sleepy, so this will be short on wittiness and intrigue.

We left Albany around 11 after a very leisurely morning, drove a few hours before meeting up with Billy and Jenny and the 5 cousins at a rest stop on the Thruway.  We encountered a crazy storm outside of Rochester that prompted me to ask Jim, "Do the windshield wipers go any faster?!"  Danny watched his first feature-length film, the original Toy Story.  There were lots of scary parts.  I'm hoping he has no bad dreams of the boy with the skeleton shirt doing bad things to Biscuit Buddy, Baby or Little Blue Doggy.  Mary made it 5.5 hours without falling asleep.  This is not so much an accomplishment as a statement of desperation and fear of what may be to come.  She finally fell asleep about 10 minutes from our destination.  We had to wake her when we got to Niagara.  Life can be so cruel sometimes, huh?

We made a brief stop at Niagara Falls (the American side), saw the falls, enjoyed the mist, then headed back to the car after Danny's 50th request for some milk.  Our gracious hosts greeted us in Orchard Park with a fantastic evening of swimming in their pool, eating pizza, playing in the great play room and finally falling asleep (Well, the kids first.  We're next.)

Toy Story is SCARY!

The Thruway is thrilling!

Conference call time!

Some good phonics/reading/writing practice, too

Niagara!

Tomorrow we are off to Ludington Michigan on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.  Long day, though, so let's hope Mary has realized there will be no escape from that car seat so she might as well fall asleep.