the girls

Upstate of Mind

By geoff on August 16th, 2014

Cristin took the ladies for a week at “Poppy and Tootsie’s Lake House” in Canandaigua, NY. The drive exceeds (by a factor of 3) the two hour minimum required for in-car entertainment so we busted out the dual-screen player and a stack of Dora and Sofia DVDs and spent at least 45 minutes remembering and packing extraneous items. The ladies’ departure gave me 2.5 solid days in the office to “get ahead” which means work on things that are disturbingly overdue. I took a one-day Hertz rental from Dartmouth to Canandaigua airport which was delayed an hour due to my getting “south-coasted”. Even after calling and reminding Hertz twice about getting picked up they completely forgot me. I almost fell for their excuse of falling behind until they called back to sheepishly ask me my address. After a six-hour journey getting caught up on world events with satellite BBC, I left the keys on a desk with a bunch of airport-rats in Canandaigua and it is unclear whether Hertz is aware that the car is there. Normally I trust the car companies but on one occasion I had rented a van from Trenton to drive some folks to Atlantic City. I got a call around a week after returning the van asking where it was which panicked me a bit given that the value exceeded my graduate stipend. Luckily they called back several hours later to report that it had been stolen from the rental lot and burned to the tires. So Trenton! I had all of thursday and friday in Canandaigua and this time was taken up by several dramatic performances by the ladies to songs from Disney’s Frozen, a trip to the playground and the Rochester Zoo, a boat tour of the lake during which the ladies were awake no more than five minutes and Tootsie was attacked by a spider, and a nice dinner with Uncle Tupp at the Bristol Harbour Resort (see below).

mmmmm. in-class entertainment