July 20 to 26th

Needless to say, I have not had time to work on the Kip/Kipp family stuff for a while.


Monday
First full day of the Rathbun family reunion at Fort Wayne. We took a bus tour to Shipshewana which is a sort of commercialized Amish town. Lots of stores to shop in and lots of eating places. We visited a store called Yodders which has lots of interesting foods, including grain and grass fed beef, pork and lamb. The day was enjoyable. Our daughter Margaret defended her PhD thesis in information science successfully. So now we have two Dr. Kipps in the family. The third one will happen later but she will be a medical doctor. Walked 9 km.

Tuesday
Spent the day researching at the Allen County Public Library. They have lots of books and micro text to look at. Took a some images of books with the digital camera. I wouldn't go all the way to Fort Wayne just to use their library, but if you are going that way have a look in their catalogue to see what they might have that would assist your family research. Walked 7.5 km.


Wednesday
Visited the Cord-Auburn-Duesenberg museum at Auburn, Indiana. A great auto museum for cars of the 30's. This was the family banquet night and it went well. Prime rib for supper - delicious! Walked 7.4 km.


Thursday
Drove from Fort Wayne to London to pick up our daughter Margaret, then we drove to Ottawa arriving about midnight. On the way we passed through some rain and watched a spectacular rainbow for perhaps half a hour as we drove along the 401 East of Belleville, Ontario. A very long day. Walked 4.3 km.


Friday
Rain, rain and more rain! The weeds are growing faster than the lawn. Walked 6.5 km.


Saturday
Did some catch up gardening and then relaxed bit. Walked 6.5 km.

Sunday
Took off from Ottawa headed for Mineola on Long Island. We decided to take a different route this time because of the problems with the Cornwall border crossing. We headed south on 416 then west along 401 to the Hill Island/Alexandria Bay crossing. We stopped at Cicero, NY just above Syracuse, NY and had a delicious turkey dinner at Plainville Farms Restaurant. We then headed south on I-87 through Courtland to Binghamton, NY. We continued south through Scranton, PA where we hit about 20 miles of road construction. We thought this was bad! We then headed into New Jersey on route 80 where we hit more traffic. The best was yet ahead of us! When we were about 4 miles away form the George Washington bridge to Manhattan we came to a stop. The traffic was so bad that we took about two hours to get to the toll booths at the GW bridge. After getting through that we took about another hour in the rain and dark to get to Mineola where my daughter lived. We left about 9:30 in the morning from Ottawa and arrived in Mineola about 10 pm. A long trip! Walked 5.2 km.