Recap of New York trip
We survived the trip to New York and back. (Barely, since my car decided to have issues starting in Maryland on our way home. Way to go, car!) Let me apologize in advance for the over abundance of photos in this post. I didn’t want to break up the post, though. (If you want to see even more pictures, click here.)
Our trip took 14 hours to get up to Buffalo (Mapquest averaged it to be 11 1/2 hours) and we didn’t make any side trips/excursions/etc. We left Buffalo on Tuesday to head to Binghamton. My original plan was to stop in Elmira and Horseheads and show my husband where I lived for several years as a child. That didn’t happen, since we left Buffalo so late and we just wanted to get out of the car. Just over 4 hours later, we arrived in Binghamton. Stopped at my cousin’s house, as she had planned a family get-together, and here are some of the pictures I took that night (excuse any duplicates from the other day – I finally resized and put some up on Flickr.)
First, me with several of my cousins children. (My cousin Carrie has 4 children and my cousin Noel has 2. That leaves my cousin Erin, me and my brother the only 3 grandchildren without kids.) 
My Uncle Al and Carrie’s son, Maverick:
My cousin Noel and me:
Emma thought Kenny’s accent was hilarious. She also thought his name was “Penny.” We corrected it before the end of the trip.
On Wednesday, we spent most of the day on the farm: 
(We used to climb this apple tree when we were kids)
The side yard:
The kids went swimming:
And we stayed on the dock:
We left on Thursday morning, around 6:30 and stopped in Hershey, PA on our way home. We wanted to go to the museum and do the chocolate tasting. The museum was cool, but probably not worth the $10 admission. We drove over to Chocolate World and the tasting was sold out for over an hour. We looked around, were unimpressed, and left Chocolate World. Had lunch at Red Robin and were back on the road within 3 hours.
In Maryland, my oil light started coming on intermittently. We were stopping anyway, so we bought oil and after about 30 minutes, were back on our way again. The oil light then came on in North Carolina. (Took the car in today and I do have an oil leak that they’re going to monitor. Only cost me the price of an oil change this time.)
We got home at 11:00 on Thursday night. Much too long to travel, if you ask me! While in Virginia, we heard about Michael Jackson’s death. Lots of text messages were sent to us (Kenny’s a huge fan, and danced to ‘Thriller’ at our wedding reception.) I’ll probably post separately at some point about that. We heard the news on NPR, so we weren’t totally late in hearing it!