road trip, day 1

we're finally on the road, en route to Windham NY where we will crawl through the mud and hopefully leap over a fire pit alongside several thousand of our American brould n';eetheren. It's going to be an exciting time for sure, but there are some adventures to be had before then...

we left home yesterday during an almost biblical downpour. the driving was...well, actually, I don't know, since I did absolutely none of it. Byron says our little rental Hyundai Accent is 'gutless' but I think if that's the worst he can say about it then it's not so bad. It's far better than being 'unsteerable' or 'difficult to bring to a stop', for example.

We tried to make good time, but the trip from Toronto to Auburn, NY somehow took almost 8 hours. We did spend quite a frustrating time trying to get out of Niagara Falls ("ooh, look, we can cross right at the falls! Won't that be nice!") and we wouldn't want to regret not getting wings for lunch in Buffalo, so we had to stop there for a while. We also passed through all sorts of tiny places that I'd never heard of: East Aurora with its surprising wind farms, Varysburg, a quaint little town, Attica (which has a gigantic walled-in jail in the middle of a suburb...unless the suburb grew up around the jail). Lima NY didn't seem to have a public washroom, and so found its soil amended ever so slightly...we also were stopped in Lima by a fellow in a car who offered to sell us meat out of the back of his truck. We eventually made our way to Auburn, where we slept like logs at the Inn at Finger Lakes. On to Albany in the morning!