4th of July fun, New York City and getting to Maine

Well, even though our friends and neighbors back home in Brookings enjoyed fireworks on our front deck, sort of, we had fun celebrating the 4th with Kevin, Steph and Erin across the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. We attended an open air concert, having a picnic lunch and it finished off with a really nice fireworks display as the orchestra played the 1812 Overture and Stars and Stripes forever.

The last week we were with the kids, we all went to New York City for a fun day.  Erin, joined by Mom Stephanie and Grammy Helga did the American Girl experience which included a hairdo for one of her dolls and high tea for them all.  Kevin and I joined them for awhile before we spent some time in a German bar watching the World Cup semi-final between Spain and Germany.  We had some mile-high pastrami sandwiches before at Carnegie Deli where we had gone last fall before our New England cruise. Funny, we sat in exactly the same seats and had the same waitress.  We reminisced with her about our last visit when we were sitting next to Chip Caray, the baseball announcer whom I recognized but couldn't remember his name, and his family.

We also attended some more swim meets cheering on Erin who did quite well.  We left on Monday, the 12th, and realize that we had a busy, fun time and we miss them.

We drove to East Lyme, Connecticut on the 12th and stayed a couple of nights at Aces High RV Park, which although a welcome change from the "jungle" at Laurel Pond, had some issues as well, especially power outages that caused our "newbie" neighbor to be running his generator most of one night!  We visited Mystic Seaport and Helga got her "Kitster" type needs met by two of the biggest casinos in the world, Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun.  They were impressive.

Yesterday we drove through Massachussets, the tip of New Hampshire, and arrived at Wells, Maine where we will stay for four nights at the Wells Beach Resort, which isn't very close to the beach but a nice RV park where we last stayed in 1994.  Had our first lobster today but I need to try it again as it proved to be not great.