York, PA Roadtrip




Matt, Jen, Chelsea, and Matt

  

Pup and Stella

Jen and I had Saturday through Monday off together and wanted to do something outside the city. We decided to use our weekend to visit our good friends, the Schoff’s, who recently moved to Pennsylvania for her school and work.



So this week I made a reservation at our usual (and usually wonderful) Enterprise Rent-A-Car location close to the apartment. They said “no problem,” and the price for a holiday weekend wasn’t bad either. But, when I arrived on Saturday morning to pick up our ride, there were no cars… not one car. I tried to stay calm as the guys told me that a truck of ten rentals was on its way from the service location but was lost and unreachable. Huh? Plus, people were just not returning the rentals on time. Luckily, the wait was less than an hour before a Nissan Versa hatchback pulled into the lot when it was my turn. They gave me the free upgrade of course but I was hoping to get the Toyota Prius that was supposedly on its way in too.  

Getting out of the city was the usual clutter; the ramps we needed to take onto the BQE (Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) were randomly closed and the traffic was chaotic. Once we finally found our way to the Williamsburg Bridge and out of the city, though, the drive was really beautiful. In PA, we drove through Dutch Country with lots of antiques and craft shops, farms, and really old, stone homes. Did you know that Lancaster (not far from York) was the first inland town in the nation? You do now. I was hoping to see some horse-drawn buggies and covered bridges but the weather was too cold to do much of anything.




Lightning fast Bella

 

While visiting the Schoff’s we got to see Matt’s six-year-old son Gavan who’s such a good kid. We (and by we, I mean just Jen) did crafts and played lots of games with him over the weekend. Our big night out (top pic) was to the Melting Pot. Oh how we missed you, Melting Pot. Chelsea is in beauty school and was thrilled when Jen asked her to do her makeup. Always sassy, she kept saying things like, “Matt! Can we please talk about your wife’s bone structure!?” Ha. She looks good right? The girls also had to take a trip into town to the giant beauty supplier, Ulta, which we actually do not have in NYC.

Pup giving Sophie the stink-eye

Pup was a good girl on our trip. Not only did she travel well, but when we arrived she had three other dogs of all shapes and sizes to tolerate. Ha. We were a little apprehensive at first; their smallest dog, Bella, looks like a squirrel and their big boxer was supposedly hyper and not very well behaved. We were pretty sure when we let them all loose together that something was going down but they survived.  At one point, Pup was actually PLAYING with the dogs, wagging tail and all! A rare sight to behold. By the end of our visit she was pretty much socialized, although still in control of the pack. We had breakfast with them Monday and said our goodbyes before heading back to NYC that afternoon.



We made it back to the city in decent time and decided, while we had the rental car, to take a trip through the ghetto to the Brooklyn Ikea. We’ve had had a list of furniture we want going for a while so we had a lot to buy. Plus, those meatballs… We got everything we wanted and more and by the time we made it to checkout, we were doubting whether it would all fit in the car.  Jen was pretty sure it wouldn’t but after some seat adjusting and finagling, all four of our large boxes of flat-packed furniture fit so perfectly in the car that we had to laugh. Things like this never workout that easily for us and we’re usually laughing to fend off the crying. There was also no traffic home so we were back in about twenty minutes. Too easy! Needless to say, we are now big fans of the Nissan Versa.