Here's another post for The Fembly. We drove down to south Jersey to visit Mom and Dad yesterday, picking up my Uncle Phil and cousin Marc along the way. What would normally have been a 2-hour drive lengthened to twice that as we ran into unusually heavy - okay, stopped - traffic on the Garden State Parkway about 13 miles from where we needed to exit. Turns out a motorcyclist some ways ahead of us hit a car as he was changing lanes, fell off his bike as a result, and got run over by a bus then another car. We saw the bus, passengers discharged and milling about in the heat, as we finally passed the parkway exit in question after an hour and a half. I'd noticed lots of glass in the road prior to reaching that exit, so I guess it was the cyclist or the car he hit. Creepy.
Anyway, we finally got there mid-afternoon and of course I proceeded to take some pictures:
My now-beardless cousin Marc helped install drivers in my parents' somewhat antiquated computer so it could read the USB drive we bought them, which we hope will finally eliminate their need to schlep a box of diskettes back and forth between Jersey and Vegas. (My Technophobic Mom did pretty well copying files over to it!) He also brought me the state quarters I'd been missing. And he drove halfway home, more about which later. Thanks Marc! Oh yeah, he says hi, Budgie.
Rob wore his Superman shirt, which kept eliciting snarky comments like "well, why didn't you just pick up the car and fly it over the traffic on the way down?"
Of course, with those slippers certain people shouldn't be talking. Yeah, you might say my Dad's a Yankees fan.
Naturally, I always have to take pictures of food, particularly at dessert time.
I particularly liked the balkava platter Dad had bought.
Uncle Phil got lots of conversation in with Dad...
...and Mom. And of course, even though Aunt Kenie wasn't there, I wanted to take at least two-thirds of a sibling picture. Mom had visited Kenie a couple weeks ago and Dad snapped this one:
So yesterday, Mom and Phil posed for me, thinking of Kenie:
Sorry I caught you with your eyes closed, Mom! Anyway, via the magic of Photoshop, Robin has produced the following fake sibling picture:
A real 2006 Sibling Picture should follow next month when we have a couple family get-togethers for folks coming in from afar...
The drive home was a bit of a nightmare - we'd gone about halfway, almost to the part where we switch from the GSP to the Turnpike, when we started seeing lots of lightning flashes around us. Then the deluge hit and, still being tired from the 4-hour drive down and hating driving in the rain and twilight, I asked Marc if he could go the rest of the way to the Bronx. He readily agreed, we switched seats at the nearby rest stop, and he took off, by which time the rain had lessened but my fatigue hadn't. When we hit the Newark area he knew enough to ask Robin to tune into the local traffic alert station to find out which NYC-bound route was best. I would've just stuck with the George Washington Bridge since I Don't Do Manhattan. Marc, bless his heart, does Manhattan. Over a 90-minute wait at the GWB, about a half-hour delay at the Holland, but no traffic at all via the Lincoln Tunnel, so zip zip zip, through the Lincoln and across 42nd and up 10th and across 57th to avoid any traffic lights on the West Side Highway, and we made better time and even mileage than we would have had I been driving. Yay Marc!
Anyway, we finally got there mid-afternoon and of course I proceeded to take some pictures:
My now-beardless cousin Marc helped install drivers in my parents' somewhat antiquated computer so it could read the USB drive we bought them, which we hope will finally eliminate their need to schlep a box of diskettes back and forth between Jersey and Vegas. (My Technophobic Mom did pretty well copying files over to it!) He also brought me the state quarters I'd been missing. And he drove halfway home, more about which later. Thanks Marc! Oh yeah, he says hi, Budgie.
Rob wore his Superman shirt, which kept eliciting snarky comments like "well, why didn't you just pick up the car and fly it over the traffic on the way down?"
Of course, with those slippers certain people shouldn't be talking. Yeah, you might say my Dad's a Yankees fan.
Naturally, I always have to take pictures of food, particularly at dessert time.
I particularly liked the balkava platter Dad had bought.
Uncle Phil got lots of conversation in with Dad...
...and Mom. And of course, even though Aunt Kenie wasn't there, I wanted to take at least two-thirds of a sibling picture. Mom had visited Kenie a couple weeks ago and Dad snapped this one:
So yesterday, Mom and Phil posed for me, thinking of Kenie:
Sorry I caught you with your eyes closed, Mom! Anyway, via the magic of Photoshop, Robin has produced the following fake sibling picture:
A real 2006 Sibling Picture should follow next month when we have a couple family get-togethers for folks coming in from afar...
The drive home was a bit of a nightmare - we'd gone about halfway, almost to the part where we switch from the GSP to the Turnpike, when we started seeing lots of lightning flashes around us. Then the deluge hit and, still being tired from the 4-hour drive down and hating driving in the rain and twilight, I asked Marc if he could go the rest of the way to the Bronx. He readily agreed, we switched seats at the nearby rest stop, and he took off, by which time the rain had lessened but my fatigue hadn't. When we hit the Newark area he knew enough to ask Robin to tune into the local traffic alert station to find out which NYC-bound route was best. I would've just stuck with the George Washington Bridge since I Don't Do Manhattan. Marc, bless his heart, does Manhattan. Over a 90-minute wait at the GWB, about a half-hour delay at the Holland, but no traffic at all via the Lincoln Tunnel, so zip zip zip, through the Lincoln and across 42nd and up 10th and across 57th to avoid any traffic lights on the West Side Highway, and we made better time and even mileage than we would have had I been driving. Yay Marc!
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