Reunion Trip

We left last Thursday for my college reunion in Rochester, NY. It is a 7-8 hour trip depending on traffic and stopping time. We made it in 7 1/2 hours, right on time. Now for those of you who are not familiar with New York State (and that may include those here in New England) I'll give you a short version of our trip. Rochester is in western New York State located just south of the NY Thruway between Buffalo and Syracuse. It may be considered "Up State" by many just because it is north of New York City. But I'll not get into that discussion here.

I've made the trip from the Albany area west to Rochester more times than I care to remember. I will tell you that it can be very boring. Pretty but boring. The longest leg seems to be from Schenectady to Utica. However, it has the Mohawk River/ Erie canal on the north side of the road. Some parts even have the railroad track following. Trains that you will see there are l o n g. We used to count the cars and often got over 100 in one train.

The river is quite wide and nowadays has lots of recreational boats. There are red and green buoys to show the safe areas to go. We saw several boats going down the river. The above picture is very common in this area. It is very nice to see so many active farms. In Canojaharie, we saw the Beech-Nut Foods plant. (Told you it was a bit boring) So, until we got to Utica we watched the river/canal come and disappear and then go under the thruway and back again.

After Utica, the exits are closer together and the trip seems to go faster then. You see such fun towns as Oneida, Chittanango, Canastota then Syracuse, Canandaigua, Weedsport, the Montezuma Wildlife Refuge and then finally, Rochester.

Finding your way around a city that you have only visited a few times in the last 28 years is fun. A GPS got us to our hotel on Main Street with out incident. There are lots of new one way streets and not the same way as before. Just to shake up the tourists.

We found our room and I took a picture from our room. You can see the main office of Eastman Kodak (Rochester's main claim to fame with Xerox - both of which are not doing well)


Here, you can see Brick Church where we were married, 50 years ago. Not the same congregation but the building is still there.


And here you can see Lake Ontario in a little strip at the top of the picture. All from our room.



The first night we had a great "Welcome" dinner at the hotel. Adjust your mind set. Go back in time 50 or so years, add gray hair, no hair, glasses etc. You get the picture. The food was great and the dessert was a huge piece of either chocolate or white cake. My friend and her husband split one of each.


All in all a good time was had by all and we then went upstairs to get ready for the next two days of gatherings.


B


www.bevsjewelry.com and www.bevsjewelry.1000markets.com