Monday, October 24, 2011

October 10, 2010--New York vacation

So I'm finally getting around to blogging a bit about our vacation. It's been two weeks ago already!

About a week before our vacation, Joy stepped on a sewing needle. She ran her hand over the carpet, trying to find it, but couldn't. So she put some antibiotic ointment on it and a bandaid and left it at that. After a couple of days, it was getting infected. I thought that was odd, since it was just a needle prick. I figured it would resolve itself. After it had been five days and the infection was getting worse intead of better, we took her to the doctor. It turned out the needle was inside her toe! They ended up having to cut her toe and pull the needle out. Here is a picture of the X-ray of her foot with the needle in her toe:

Two days after her minor surgery, we left to go to New York to visit the Penners. We drove all day on Thursday, through Ohio and up to Lake Erie where stopped for a few minutes and took some pictures, then clipped the corner of Pennysylvani, and then up into New York. We finally got there late, around 10:00 p.m. if I remember correctly. We stayed there for two days. They took us hiking and we went and splashed in their creek. They had little fishies in the creek that nibbled my toes when I stood in the water. It was so much fun and so beautiful. The fall colors were so beautiful!



Sunday morning we left really early and drove to D.C. We had planned to get there around noon, but that didn't quite happen. There was a really long detour in Pennsylvania due to an accident, plus we decided to stop in Hershey and see Chocolate World. So by the time we got to the Smithsonians we had about 45 minutes before the museum closed. We did a mad dash through the American History museum, stopping to snap photos of the First Lady dresses, and then walked out to see the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial before it got dark.


At that point, we had planned on driving out to a St. Park in West Virginia to camp, but it was starting to rain and it was cold. We didn't relish the thought of setting up a tent in the dark and in the rain, so we decided to call and see where an America's Best Value in was located in West Viriginia instead, since we happened to have their number on our Value Club card and they are the most reasonably priced motel we've ever stayed in. I was having a hard time finding the cities the lady on the phone mentioned on my map, and I ended up reserving one near Charleston. We tried to take a shortcut over the mountains, since the interstate went way around. That was a bad idea. The road was very narrow, with tight curves. Erick couldn't even take the curves at the posted speed limit, which was 15 mph, because he was afraid he'd flip the van. Signs warned us that there was a 9% upward grade for the next three miles, and we'd go up and up, into the clouds so we couldn't even see in front of us. It was dark, and we could tell there were guard rails that were not just for decoration, but we couldn't see how far the drop-off was. Then we'd go down and our ears would pop, and then back up again. One sign we passed said that the mountain we had just climbed was 3200 feet. I didn't even know that they had mountains that tall in West Virginia. We were on that road for two hours, and then we had another two hours to go by the time we finally reached the interstate. It was 3:30 a.m. before we ever got to bed that night.

We slept until 11:00 the next day and then went straight home. We were too tired to go hiking, which is what we had intended on doing. We did detour through French Lick, Indiana, because everyone talks about it and we wanted to see what the fuss was about. It was good to get home, and we enjoyed our vacation very much.

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