Back Home Again

We are back home after a week visiting family in Massachusetts! We made great time on the road both up and back, because my hubby decided that in order to beat the holiday week traffic on I-95, we would leave at 1:30 AM. This allowed the drivers ( Mark and Alex ) to get a couple of hours sleep before making the 13 hour trip. The rest of us never went to bed. It worked - 13 hours up, and 12 hours coming back because we took a slightly different route...
That's the fastest we can make that drive. Our worst time ever was 18 hours... let's not talk about that time.

We stayed with my parents and just "hung around" all week. There was a full house, because not only did we descend with 6 people ( Sarah couldn't make the trip because of work ), but the cousins wanted to spend time together so my 2 nieces and my nephew also bunked over at Grammy & Grampa's house!
The weather was quite mild, even cool sometimes ~ I regretted not packing a sweatshirt. But that's so much better than hot and muggy, so no complaints here! My aunt and uncle and a couple of cousins and their families all came over for a cook-out one night. We enjoyed a cook-out with the neighbors on the 4th, and their covered front porch provided shelter from the rain. And we spent an afternoon visiting Mark's college roommate, who happens to be chaplain for both the Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots.

We spent one afternoon visiting my sister at her cafe,Victoria Station Cafe, in Putnam, CT. They are getting ready to move into a new, bigger location just two doors down from where they are now, and the excitement is growing. Chris and Dave make all their own pastries, so of course we had to sample some cannolis, lobster tails, fruit tarts, lemon squares, bicotti, and even some savory chicken pot pie. yum yum yum And of course, the kids wanted frozen cappucinos and smoothies. There's even something for the youngest - YoYo Cappucino ( so named by my niece when she was about 3 ) - which is milk with chocolate and coffee syrups and whipped cream.

Although Mark's family lives close by, we almost didn't get to see them this trip. His mother and his sister and her family were expecting to return home Tuesday after a vacation in Europe. But their flight out of London was cancelled due to the bomb scare at Heathrow, so they had to reschedule another flight for Thursday. Fortunately, they did get home safely and we got to spend one evening with them before we headed back south.

It was also fun getting to meet cousin Luigi, my dad's second cousin from Italy who is also visiting my parents for the summer. He is 27 yrs old, a language teacher who speaks 3 languages fluently - Italian, Spanish, French. He came here to improve his English, which really isn't bad at all! He said that he was surprised by 2 things so far ~ that so many American homes are "in the forest", as he put it , and that we all didn't eat at McDonald's every day!!!

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