It was nice to wake up in New York State. We haven’t lived here in a long time but being in the area always feels very familiar. Grandpa used to talk about how flat and boring the Illinois landscape was when he would come to visit. He wasn’t a complainer so he wasn’t complaining, but he’d just lived in New York his whole life. Personally I’ve lived in Illinois long enough to call it home, but you still feel ties to the places you’ve loved.

Grandma’s place she’s staying is only minutes from the river. After visiting with her in the morning and spending some time while she ate her lunch, we found a place to eat nearby. We had a different hotel to check into for tonight and they let us check in early, so at 2PM. We had some chill time where the other girls talked about church stuff and one Facetimed back home. I laid down to hopefully nap and thankfully fell asleep.

The kids all had races. Ethan had one in South Dakota and the other kids were running in the GRIT run at camp. They made it a meet this year with several other Lutheran high schools. The girls ran first, then the boys, and then the open race like they normally have. I followed Ethan’s from the room since he was the one I could watch online. I was also watching the TeamReach app and seeing pictures from the races at camp.

After waking up we visited a lakeside park. Besides the river and the trees, these are not familiar areas for us. We lived about 45 minutes north from where we’re staying. So basically we explored for a while. There were young couples at the park as well as old ones. There were medium aged ones also out on the boats. Two guys were waterskiing and their significant others were in some other kind of boat I’ve never seen before.

After the park we walked on a bridge. It was called the Hudson River Walkway and went across the entire river. One of my sisters is 31 weeks pregnant and was not in a condition to be walking very much once we got to the bridge. We have arrangements with each other where the expectation is we all just have to voice our needs when we have them. She needed to not have to walk to the river so we went on ahead of her.

We told her we’d just get out to where we were over the river, take some pictures, and then come back. She was okay with that. When we reached a certain point we called her and had her turn around and start heading back to the start of the bridge. She wanted to walk just not that far. It would’ve been neat to walk across it but we also wanted to get back to our Grandma. We stayed and visited for the rest of the night with her.