Country roads...Take me home...

It has been more than a month since I last posted. I don't really have an excuse...except there has just been so much to report that it started snowballing and seemed like too big of a project. In the interest of catching up, I will start back in the first week of October, when I rented a car and drove to Philadelphia to pick up my mom and dad who were just getting back to the U.S. after a month in Europe. We took a few days for a family reunion in West Virginia, where we stayed at Stonewall Jackson Resort which turned out to be lovely and quiet, surrounded by rolling hills full of trees about to turn colors. Our cabin was right on a lake, and was full of wood and light. We swam in the pool there, the kids fished in the lake and otherwise the time was just full of visiting with relatives and my mom's amazing baked beans. It was hot and sunny. On the way to the resort we visited some other cousins of mine and their kids and it was fun to see my kids and theirs meeting for the first time. They were fast friends, and my kids loved playing with Ally's new kitten and an annoying electronic cheerleading doll, and scoring some drink umbrellas when we went out to eat one night.
There is, of course, a lot more to say on the subject...like about leaving your roots the way my parents did when they moved from West Virginia to Seattle after college, the merits of a more simple country sort of life or maybe even the relationships we remember as children with older relatives and what a trip it is to think about how we pass that on to our own kids. But I haven't the energy to expound on that here, at least not right now.
The kids did admirably on the 7 hour drive back to NY. Helped, no doubt by the fact that my mother rode between them the whole way, spending a lot of time reading books, creating games and in general catching up with them and keeping them occupied. Until this past month we had never done a long driving trip with the kids. Somehow it never appealed. I would take a 19 hour airplane trip over a 5 hour car trip in the company of kids. But it turned out that was unwarranted. It was fun and they did great.