Hey, we fit it all in the car!  Barely.  I mean, the girls did have to crouch in the cargo area.

 This is even before we added the four bikes to the back!

Day 1: Escape from New England

Chicopee, MA to Buffalo, NY

Well, naysayers, we had a rousing success on Day 1, despite 7+ hours in the car.  (I think this is a combination of the novelty not yet wearing off and the candy bags not yet running empty.) 

After a restful night at Grandma's, and well fortified with pancakes delivered to us by Aunt Rosemarie, we hit the road around 9:30, with the back end of the van not quite dragging on the ground.  (The everything bagels from Grandma almost put us over the edge.)  It was a pleasant 2 1/2 hour drive to our first stop, Howe Caverns.  Zoe, who unlike the rest of us does not become extremely nauseated if she tries to read in the car, was kind enough to read to us from The Wizard of Oz, which we'd downloaded onto her Kindle.  (The Kindle is entirely populated with books from about 100 years ago, because they are free!)

The area around Howe Caverns was surprisingly lovely, with rolling hills of farmland and quaint little towns that looked like something out of an old movie.  We sat outside and ate our lunch (peanut butter for the first of what I'm sure will be many, many times) while waiting for our tour.  The caves were pretty neat, although I kept finding myself thinking it was something similar to Disney World and waiting for the animatronic pirates to jump out.  It was so civilized, and so crowded, that it didn't quite feel like something from nature.

Afterward we sat out on the big hill in front, and forced the children to run way down to the gate at the far side and back up, to burn off some energy.  Nadia took a picture of us from near the bottom:

If you really squint, you may be able to see Bob and I, lounging about and waving from above the "W".  The tiny pink dot on the bottom of the "E" is Lanie panting her way back up the hill.

After a few more hours in the car (helped along by the On the Banks of Plum Creek audiobook), we stopped in Rochester for dinner.  Bob had fond memories of Dinosaur Barbecue from his Syracuse days, so we headed for there.  Of course, arriving at 6:30pm on a Saturday night wasn't the best planning, so we ended up having to wait an hour to eat.  (We strolled around a bit and would have gone somewhere else instead, except that downtown Rochester seems to be unaccountably bereft of any kind of restaurant.)  Rochester seemed a lot nicer than I expected, and the meal was worth the wait.  The girls insisted they were STARVING and would need the entire rack of ribs to split, and while we're at it, why not the special platter that comes with 4 side dishes?  Naturally, they failed miserably to eat all this food.

So we're now ensconced at a Red Roof Inn in Buffalo.  We went for a pretty cheap hotel since we're not spending much time here, but it's not too bad other than a very faint odor that I can't quite place and figure it's best not to dwell on.   Ready to head to Niagara Falls in the morning...


***

Many people will be happy to learn that we did not lose a single child in the subterrainian twists of Howe Caverns.  Safe cave dwelling, long an important skill of us people, is especially important on this trip because we will have the opportunity to spend so much time underground.  Featured among these opportunities are Jewel Cave, Wind Cave, Spook Cave, Tom Sawyer Cave, and Mammoth Cave, none of which are made up.   We've already passed on one, Secret Caverns.  This seems to be a slightly daffy neighbor to Howe Caverns.  You can't go in every cave you see, that's what I say. 

What is our personal trick for staying together while spelunking?  It was pretty easy, actually.  Nadia was a little freaked out by the whole thing and held my hand very tightly.  The only effect the surroundings seemed to have on Lanie was to echo her many pronouncements, so there was little hope of losing track of her.  And Zoe had the camera, so we just had to follow the flash pops to find her.