Alright alright alright already. The terrible, horrible drought of blogging here has finally come to an end. Up until this point, I have been busy doing a number of things lately, not the least of which has been GRADUATING, so cut me some slack here people. Luckily, that means that together with the act of graduating and also the recent vacation to the east coast, I have spent a vast amount of time with my family. That in turn means I now have ample material for blogging. So here goes.
As I mentioned, my family and I just got back from a delightful family vacation to the east coast. Well, at least, we flew into Kennedy Airport on Long Island, NY which most people would consider the east coast. But that is not where we stayed. No no no no no. Then we drove due west. Why? For some reason, in my family, just because you want to see specific sights does not mean you need to get a hotel anywhere near them, nor in the same state or even one of the states bordering them. No, we wanted to see Manhattan yet we stayed in Pennsylvania (cheaper, you know). In case you need to brush up on your geography, let me remind you of the situation. Going west from Manhattan there's New York, New Jersey, Arizona, Switzerland, Thailand, and then Pennsylvania. It's a three and a half hour drive each way (if there's no traffic...yeah I laughed too) between NY and PA. Now I can't accuse my family of being completely illogical about this since they decided that if we were staying in Pennsylvania we should make time to see some things in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, the only things to see in Pennsylvania are in the southern part of the state and we, of course, were staying in the north. Turns out Pennsylvania is a much bigger state that anybody thought and driving north to south is also a three hour drive. Each way. And that is how we found ourselves in Hershey, Lancaster County, and Philadelphia, PA. These places are all clustered together about an hour away from each other at most, but as was previously mentioned, THREE HOURS EACH WAY away from us. So our day trips were more like allllllll day trips. We typically got up at 6 am (3 am if you're on west coast time), left at 7 am, drove till 9 am, and since we had gotten up at the buttcrack of dawn that morning, usually wanted to go home at 6 pm to be in bed by 9 or 10 pm to get up and do it again the next day. My favorite was parking our car at the Hertz rental place at Kennedy airport on Thursday (my dad talked Hertz into letting us park the car there for free while we visited Manhattan since that's where we rented it from), getting back to it at 9 pm, driving back to our hotel by midnight, then waking up at 6 am the next morning to drive right back to the airport where we were exactly 12 hours before. I'll just sum this up with two numbers: when we got the rental car, it had 200 miles on it. When we gave it back a week later, it had 2,500 miles on it. (Yes, we had an unlimited mileage rental package, effectively screwing over Hertz. Mwahahaha.) That means that we could have driven from Long Beach to New York and it would have been about the same thing. Grrrr.
So yeah, we went to Pennsylvania. First was HersheyPark, a.k.a. Chocolate World U.S.A. They attract a pretty impressive clientele might I add. No one at the park weighed less than 200 hundred pounds, children included. But I suppose if you love chocolate enough to make a pilgrimage to the Mecca known as Hersheyville, you would have to be willing to let that sweet chocolately-ness distort your figure a bit.
Next was Pennsylvania Dutch country where people commonly referred to as the Amish live. Amish. Pronounced AHHHHH-mish. Not I-mish nor Eigh-mish. My dad still has not learned this. It's not too big of a problem unless you are talking to one.
"So you Eigh-mish don't use any electricity?"
"It's pronounced Ahhh-mish, sir."
"If the Eigh-mish don't use electricity, what's that stove doing over there in the corner?"
"It's Ahhh-mish, sir. Not 'Eigh-mish'. And that stove is propane."
"So you I-mish don't pay Social Security? What do you do with the old people?"
"We AHHH-MISH believe in taking care of our elders ourselves at home."
That was almost as embarrassing as practically hitting a deer in the road when my dad saw an Amish boy on rollerblades and took his hands off of the wheel to take a picture. He drove slowly through the streets muttering, "I just want to smoke them all out so I can see all of them. Look at that one! Look there's another one!"
Now I'm going to tell you a little known fact about Amish country and once I tell you, you'll know why it isn't too heavily advertised. Everybody thinks the center of the Amish community is Lancaster, PA. Not true. There's a smaller town outside of Lancaster called...get ready for this...Intercourse. Yes Intercourse, Pennsylvania is the center of everything. Don't ask me why. But as if that isn't enough, the near-by towns of Virginville, Bareville, Bird in Hand, and Blue Ball round out the neighborhood. So we had a pleasant drive through Amish country, holding our tongues all the way and feeling incredibly uncomfortable, and when we got tired of that we stopped in the outlet mall also conveniently located in Amish country (kind of unexpected, right?) where I got really cheap Banana Republic jeans and a couple things from J. Crew. Nice.
It's not like I could afford anything in Manhattan, that's for sure. The toll just to drive in and out is $10. But to me, it was well worth it. I wanted to go to the Guggenheim museum but I knew it would bore the rest of my family. Case in point:
"So Kellie, what's this Google thing you want to see?"
"It's called the Guggenheim, Dad, and it's an art museum."
"This Guggenheim guy was an artist?"
"No, he had a big art collection."
"Why would he have a big art collection if he wasn't an artist?"
At this point Katie took the opportunity yet again to inform us she was tired/cranky/sweaty/annoyed/unhappy/mad at the world and that she would like someone to buy her a drink from a street vendor. My dad only heard the word "drink":
"Guggenheim was a drunk artist? That could be worth seeing after all."
We ended up not at a museum, but at a restaurant. (Not surprising.) The Carnegie Deli serves cows on bread. My sandwich had about 5 pounds of meat in it. And because that wasn't nearly enough food, we also ordered cheesecake. (Hey, when in New York, eat like a New Yorker, right?) That may have been the highlight of the entire trip. I highly recommend Carnegie Deli cheesecake.
Next we went from cheesecake in New York to cheese steak in Philadelphia. See what I did there? First of all, I don't mean to offend anyone (not that I'm worried that too many Philadelphians are going to be reading this), Philadelphia has the meanest people I've ever met. Give me a New Yorker any day. A New Yorker demands clarity and brevity, yes, and if you ask them a dumb question they will tell you that you asked a dumb question in no uncertain terms, but Philadelphians never even give you a chance and they are very protective of their cheese steak. We asked a park ranger at Independence Hall where to find the best cheese steak in Philly and he told us to go to New York. Very funny.
So I pretty much ate my way through the vacation--chocolate in Hershey, cheesecake in New York and cheese steak in Philadelphia. Not bad for a week's work.
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