The Nook Does New York: Days 5-6

On Sunday, the plan was to pack up at the B&B, head to Nora's parents' house in Trumansburg for lunch, and then make the drive back to Rochester, where we'd stay the night and fly out at six a.m. Monday morning. Todd and I were still SO determined to make the hike to Taughannock Falls that we'd been attempting every day for the entire vacation, and so since we had some time to kill before lunch, we packed up Baby C (Max went with Nana and Pippi for the day) and headed out. Of course, by the time we actually had breakfast and finished packing and got the cars loaded and went pee and ran inside several times to grab things we'd forgotten, it was later than we'd anticipated, so we were running short on time. Nonetheless, we were determined to see the falls, and so we headed out.

There is a scenic overlook of the falls that we'd been told existed a short ways before the trailhead, but I'd never paid it much mind because I figured that they'd be far away and hard to see from an overlook. I was wrong! Since we were passing the overlook anyway on the way to the trail, we decided to stop really quickly and take a look. The view was amazing - really, the overlook is quite close the falls, and you can see the trail itself pretty well, down below.

By the time we were done taking pictures, we realized that we didn't really have time to hike the trail all the way to the falls and back. I would have been disappointed, but honestly, the view from the overlook was so great that I felt like my falls-sightseeing-longings had been perfectly satisfied! So, we decided just to head on back to Nora's parents' house for lunch, which we did, and had a great time. When we got to Rochester later that evening, we stayed at Jake and Nora's house there, so we didn't have to pay for a hotel.

In the morning, we awoke at 3:30 a.m. and prepared to leave for the airport. Of course, we discovered then that our first flight had been delayed about 3 hours, which would make us miss all of our connections, and so our entire itinerary had to be revamped. When all was said and done, we ended up not leaving Rochester for another 9 hours. This really wasn't a big deal since we were with Todd's parents and it just meant that we got more time to spend with them; the rest of our flights and connections were all still reasonably spaced. It just meant we got home later, but that was okay. The worst part was waking up so early after a late night and a long trip and being incredibly deprived of sleep.

The very excellent thing about the flight delay was that, since we had so much time to kill, we had time to go to Beers of the World, a store in Rochester I'd been dying to see. As you can probably guess, it's a beer shop, but what you may not immediately guess is that it's the size of a grocery store and filled with every kind of beer you can imagine, both imported and domestic, along with homebrew supplies, a gourmet soda selection, and even an array of brews on tap for samples and growler filling.

Gettin' fancy with Pic Collage

Lambic, anyone?

This is maybe a quarter of the store, if that gives you any perspective as to scale.

For lunch we went to yet another Wegman's. Of course. They just kept getting fancier and fancier every time we went to one.

Here are a few more random photos of the last leg of our journey. Sorry for the boring layout; I have to blog off of the iPad for the next few weeks and it's a bit limiting.

Niagara Falls! ...It doesn't look like much from the air, I've got to say. But I'm sure I'll be more impressed when we see it up close on the road trip to Maine in two weeks!

Finding ways to keep ourselves entertained on layovers

Wildfires in Washington state, as seen from the sky.

Tired boys...

...Tired mama. I'm going strong, though, subsisting solely on peanut m&ms and my magical supermom powers!

By the time we got home, we'd been awake for 26 hours. Whew!! But by George (people don't say that enough... I'm going to resurrect that saying, right here and right now), we did it! We survived a trip across the country with a toddler and a 2 week old! And now we're going to buckle down and start packing for an even bigger trip: our move to Maine in two weeks.

...On to the next adventure!

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