Meadville

This weekend we traveled up to Meadville to celebrate Grandpa's 90th birthday. The kids were thrilled to stay in a hotel Friday evening, and Jamie thought Super 8 was our new home. After a pitiful "Continental breakfast" on Saturday morning we headed out on the road. We neared Meadville around 9:30, much too early to go directly to Grandpa's. Hooray for side trips!
Pymatuning has been fixed up, and is much nicer than I remember from my childhood. The refreshment/souveneir stand was open for business, and we bought the requisite bags of day-old bread. Dot showed restraint, carefully breaking up the buns into smaller pieces, and her bag lasted the whole time we were there. Jamie, however, quickly threw whole buns into the water, and spent much of the time without anything to feed to the ducks and fish. (Apparently he is cute enugh that older women will give him free bags of bread, though, so he recovered at the end.) The fish are still large and numerous, and willing to fight for their food. The ducks provide more fight, color and sound, which Jamie really enjoyed. However, the wind was blowing the cold air through our clothing, and we were turning blue.










Back to the car, and onto Meadville! Of course, we had to stop at Cutters. Unfortunately, it's not as tacky as when we were young, and there wasn't much there to interest us. We did buy a "flipping frog" and a pig mechanical pencil, though; our bill was less than a dollar, so I guess it was worth the money.
We finally headed up to lunch with Grandpa, although Jim decided not to infect the whole retirement home with his cough- he headed out to KFC. It was good to see everyone who was able to make it up for the party. (The staff bent over backward to keep Jamie and Dot happy at lunch - I would have left a large tip if we had been at a restaurant! ) Once we were done, though, and most of the other residents had gone back to their rooms, Jim came in for cake and conversation. We enjoyed the few hours we had, and I am sure we wore Grandpa out thoroughly. I know I'm up for a nap this afternoon!