In which we come home to roost

We’re back. We spent the last week exploring Western New York, marching around state parks and seeing the sites from Ithaca to Buffalo. Lots of waterfalls, culminating in Niagara, which outfalls them all. You’re close enough to walk over it on a tightrope, plus you do get to ride in the kitschy old Maid of the Mist into the Horseshoe Falls, which is way cooler than it ought to be. And very misty, as you might imagine. No false advertising there.

Buffalo was way more interesting than I had expected. We stayed in a nice old neighborhood near the museums, and did a lot of walking around looking at how the other half lives, or, I guess nowadays, how the other one percent lives, given that the numbers have changed a bit since the phrase was coined. Frank Lloyd Wright knocked together the odd bungalow in the area, most notably the Darwin Martin house, whence originated the Tree of Life windows. Quite a place. The Buffalo Historical Museum is the remaining building from the 1901 Exposition, the one McKinley should have stayed away from. Nearby you get to see where he died, and where TR was sworn in. Downtown has an amazing Louis Sullivan building, plus some other notable buildings, so that was also fun to walk around. There's a surprising amount of history there at the end of the Erie Canal.

Before that, we stayed in Ithaca, chugging around the university a few times, including a trip to the Pei-designed Johnson museum. Cornell is one big campus, let me tell you. It’s not like I’m not on a lot of college campuses now and then, but this one takes the cake. I can’t imagine arriving there one’s first day. I would have run away screaming, except I would have gotten so lost that I would never have found the exact away to run to.

And on the way back, we hit up the Corning Glass Museum, which is absolutely worth a trip. Lots of information, demos, displays—we spent quite a few hours there, taking it all in. Unfortunately, we stayed the night in town, and it was hopping with high school prom people taking up all the good seats at the restaurants. Proms are like Halloween, except the people don’t seem to notice the silliness of the costumes. Oh, to be young again, in a powder blue tuxedo. (No, I never wore one myself. Powder blue, that is. I was much too fashionable for that. Still am, obviously.)

Anyhow, it was only a week, but it was nice to get away. And now it’s back at the DJ, and final prepping for Dallas this weekend. In other words, it's a busy couple of weeks before settling in for a little bit of summer.

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