This is my 4th day with my cold. Yesterday evening, I thought I was heading toward the end, but I was overly optomistic, still coughing and still with a clogged nose. Sore throat long gone, never had fever, Covid test negative.

So I have been stuck in the house, with time on my hands, looking at things that have not been touched in a long time.

This innocent looking book is one of those things. It follows a road trip we took years ago. The trip started on July 31 and ended on August 18. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down the year. But we visited someone who died in 2008, so that tells me something, and we had dinner with a couple a year after they married, so with a little initiative, I could figure it out.

The trip was also before I took pictures with my phone. It’s when I still used a camera, which means the trip pictures are somewhere here.

If I had the energy…….

So, we are talking about a trip that we took about 20 years ago. And don’t worry. I am only reporting highlights.

For some reason, we left home during evening rush hour and only drove to Harrisburg, and the next day to Syracuse.

On the way, we visited a closed anthracite coal mine near Scranton, which was fascinating, as you actually go down into the mine.

I assume you can still take the mine tour. We didn’t look at Scranton this trip, but have been back. Joe Biden’s home town, of course, and the home of a very impressive railway museum.

Syracuse is where Edie got her first of several degrees, and where she still had friends. We visited one of her best college friends, Kate, and we visited Kate’s mother in the suburb of Pompey. Kate’s mother passed away in 2008. We stayed in Syracuse for a couple of nights before heading north. We, as always, were amazed at Kate’s garden, and had dinner with her, her boyfriend Alan (now her husband), her brother Bob, and her sister Jill and husband of one year, Ken. All interesting folks. Kate, like Edie, became a nurse after graduating in other fields, Bob was then managing the Syracuse airport, and Alan is a lawyer, whom I always enjoy talking with. He is a criminal defense attorney who has become a national authority on sentencing and related matters.

From Syracuse, we went north (yes, you can go north from Syracuse) to the Thousand Islands, a beautiful area on the St. Lawrence River, in the country of Canada, then a close ally of the U.S. Actually, there are 1800 islands in the Thousand Islands area, and we spent a night on a very picturesque one.

From there, we drove to Ottawa, where we had never been, and really liked the city. The Canadian Parliament Building, the American Embassy down the street, and the Moshe Safdie-designed National Gallery of art, lined up in a row. We walked, we shopped, we ate, and we stayed two nights in the beautiful Chateau Laurier Hotel, one of the country’s Canadian Pacific hotels, which has been operating since 1912.

We also went to the Museum of Canadian Culture, if that is what it is called. Very interesting. In fact, the only disappointment in Ottawa was, as we drove out of town, we saw the then new rink built for the Ottawa Senators, which they decided to put out in the suburbs, rather than the city. Opportunity missed, I thought.

Well, the trip did not end until August 18, and we are only on August 5, and this post is long enough. I guess I know what I will write about tomorrow (and maybe even Tuesday) unless Trump starts another war he can stop.