Well everyone, yesterday was a great day for driving.. Even though cloudy, the sun kept showing up at the right time. We only saw rain in parts of upstate NY and Canada. The day started at my mom's place in the Bronx at 8AM. I started heading north on 87 towards Albany where I picked up Todd and visited his family.. lovely French Toasts and sandwiches which came in handy late at night in Canada. Anyways, after Albany we headed west on 90 towars Rochester when we stopped to visit a friend of mine from Ecuador who has just had twins!! His love story with Vanessa, a Rochester native, is pretty incredible but I'll share it at some other point in time.
Ok, so after having a beer at his place and watching him take care of the twins, we decided to head west to Buffalo. Here is where I did my undergrad so we spent about 1/2 hour around campus visiting all hallways and stuff.. very very nice but nostalgic. Oh well, we had to move on and have some Buffalo Wings.. so we headed to Gabriel's Gate, a pretty good restaurant and had extra hot wings.. hmmmm (did I mention that I'm a wing fanatic?)
By this time it was getting late.. perhaps about 7PM so we got going and went straight for Niagara Falls.. Todd was doing a great job navigating and documenting.. you'll see the pictures. The Falls were incredible as always but packed with people! Parking lots were full of 4th-July vacationers so we were not able to stop properly. We've both seen the falls before so after a quick illegal stop on the road (shhhh..) we took pictures and moved on towards Canada.
Crossing Canada was easy and after that, we headed north on the QEW highway and then onto 403, 401 and 402 highways.. we made a technical stop at a Tim Hortons/Wendy's to make sure I was awake as it was already midnight.. this is where the sandwiches of Aunt Ruddick came in handy with their plentiful portions of Salami, Ham and other cuts (It must have been 1 inch thick).
As we approach the Canada-US border near Sarnia we stopped at the Duty Free to get some Canadian memorabilia.. First country down!!! About 45 mins later we were at Todd's mom place. Lovely apt.. slept like a baby!..
Now, as far as logistics go, we're headed towards Nashville, TN to stay with our friend Jessica.. (Thanks Jess in advance!) Now, the not-so-friendly people at the VW dealership in the Bronx failed to fix a few issues with my car before we left. So we are now going to stay an extra day in Dallas to have the hatchback of the golf (which fails to lock) fixed. Also, we will do a free multi-point checkup for the car (check out the vw.com website for the coupons)..
You may also be asking yourselves why we left on July 2nd instead of the 1st and the reasons where many.. This was Greg gets to spend July 4th with his buddy Jeff in Dallas, Jessica can host us with drinks until late at night since she has to work on Monday but not Tuesday and I got to spend an extra day with the best Mom in the world at her home in the Bronx. A side benefit of this was that we don't have to drive on Saturday which was the beginning of the July 4th break which would surely have meant endless traffic jams.
Now we are off to Nashville.. wish us luck and thanks to all the people who called us on the phone to check up on us!!
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