Christine and I returned last night from our weekend up in Western NY.  We left Friday morning at 5am and amazingly, hit no major traffic.  After arriving at my sister’s place in Springville, NY we went out to dinner with a good portion of the family and then saw the town’s display of fireworks near my old elementary school.

The following day a whole bunch of us went up to my uncle’s cottage by Java Lake, where we cooked out over the campfire, went fishing and paddle boating as well as swimming.  Later that night Christine and I were left with the cottage to ourself, and we were able to see a few different displays of fireworks over the treeline on the other side of the lake.  The cottage itself is very beautiful, something I wouldn’t mind owning someday myself.

Sunday brought a bit of sleeping in, and after a power outage in the area around the cottage we departed for my sister’s place to pickup some things we had left there.  On the way we stopped and picked our own strawberries in a field, 1 quart cost us $2 which is pretty cheap.  After that we randomly stumbled across an annual festival that the village of Sardinia has, which had some carnival rides, games, a horse show, chicken bbq, and a small park.  We had a great time in the few hours we spent there, and then departed for my grandmother’s house out in the country.  We swam in her pool, had bbq ribs for dinner, and then headed up to Buffalo, NY where my sister and her boyfriend took us, along with my Mom up to see Niagra Falls.

We took the pedestrian walkway and didn’t realize we needed our passports, but the canadian border patrol guy was nice, and believed we were U.S. Citizens so he let us enter.  A short walk past the Hard Rock Cafe led us to a small town center-ish area where a bunch of people were gathered.  Christine inquired about what was going on and we found out that there were going to be fireworks, which promptly started 5 minutes later and were quite amazing, shooting right over the falls, which were lit up and very colorful.  Returning to the US was a cinch, as they didn’t even ask us for passports, although we weren’t pointed to the correct exit so we had one last run-in with border patrol at the bus exit, and were allowed to go about our business and return home.

The drive was about 11 hours each way, and we returned last night at about 12:30am, just in time to get some sleep and get back to work!  Pictures will be included in this post later tonight.