The only way to get through writing about summer vacation is through. Or maybe to use Chat GPT, but nobody wants that. (Or do you?)
I don’t know why it’s hard to sit down and write sometime. I want to read blog recaps of my vacation. I want to have blog recaps of my vacation. I want you to read about my vacation. But, sitting down and writing about my vacation, it feels exhausting. Probably because I’m not on that vacation anymore, I’m back working, and working is exhausting.
In fact, simply existing in this country, this world, this is exhausting. I should stop checking the news, but I find it hard. BUT.
So at the end of July, Louie and I set out on our road trip. The plan: approximately one week visiting Leslie and family in Chautauqua as we love to do in the summer and then a camping road trip through Vermont, New Hampshire, and up into Maine towards Acadia, the final destination, and then turning back and driving two days to return to St Louis.
Easy peasy, if you like driving and mosquitoes. Which we do. Except the mosquitoes.
Any good road trip starts the day before with packing. I should do a blog post on packing for a camping trip, because we have it down to a science, if by science I mean, we have a list, and then we throw everything in the car and spend the next two weeks arguing over how we packed the car and disagreeing over where everything should go, and continually losing things and finding them again. And at some point, we will try to reorganize and decide that we have done a much better job than before but really it’s only because at that point half the clothes are in the dirty laundry bag and most of the food has been eaten…but that’s not important right now.
So we loaded up and added the bikes on the back, since this was also a trip with bikes. And we hit the road by 9 am, which was the plan.
We always drive in one day to Chautauqua, which says it will take 10 hours to get there and always takes much longer, so we end up stopping for dinner near Cleveland at a Mexican restaurant right off the highway. We’ve done this for the past few years and enjoy it.

And then we made it to Chautauqua! It was late, so Luca (my nephew) was already asleep but everyone else was still up.
The next few days don’t need a day by day, so I’ll just do highlights:
Pontoon boat ride: (Or “tonpoon” as Luca said later)
We rented a Pontoon boat for an afternoon on Chautauqua Lake. It was fun to ride around and then stop, drop anchor, and do some swimming.





We attended the weekly “Sunday party” and I saw an old classmate that I hadn’t seen in over a decade, which was fun. We attended several concerts and got to see Athena in something called Air Band as well.



Louie enjoyed a Louie IPA.

We went out to dinner at Pine Junction, which is a nice place to enjoy an outdoor meal, and on the way home saw some cows on the road.


It was a fun week. Weather wise, it started out really hot and humid, which you feel there because there is no A/C. By the end it had cooled off a little. It was great to see the kids, and I definitely felt a bit sad leaving, especially because I wished I had spent a little more time with Luca: he had camp all day and then went to bed early, so I felt like I got more time with Athena and less time with him, and the last night we went to a concert with her but left him…but it was still great to see everybody! We’ll have to get out to Phoenix this year somehow.
The kids and Peter (my BIL) were heading home for the summer since school was starting up pretty soon after we left, so it was the end for them, so it was bittersweet goodbyes all around. We loaded up the car and headed east to Vermont…