Bellicose Bumpkin

You might have noticed that my blog posts were a bit thin over the last 10 days or so. That’s because I was in France with the family on vacation. We had a fantastic vacation and I’ll be posting about it a lot over the next week or so. Our trip was flawless except for the return trip. We flew from Boston to JFK, JFK to Nice, France and did the opposite on the way back. The trip from Nice to JFK was fine. We got in at around 1:30 yesterday(Thurs) afternoon and were supposed to have a 4 hour layover – leaving at around 5:30. The flight was initially delayed for two hours – apparently by a line of thunderstorms.

That two hour delay quickly turned into 3, which begat 4, which begat 5 and so until we finally boarded the plane around midnight. Then we sat on the runway for over an hour for various reasons. We were told that the boarding gate computer crashed – the boarding agent collected all our boarding passes to re-enter them. We finally took off around 1 or 1:15 AM(Fri morning) and got back to Boston at around 2AM. At that point it had been 24 hours since we left our Bed & Breakfast in France.

I’m officially adding JFK to my list of the world’s suckiest airports. On the way to France there was a horrible wait at security in JFK. On the way back there was an awful wait at the checkin counter followed by the delays I just talked about. JFK will forever be in the my personal Pantheon of Airports That Suck just after Heathrow..

Now – back to the 2136 unread emails that greeted me this morning.

Here are a few pics from a recent camping trip to DAR State Forest. This is one of the best places I’ve ever camped at – keeping in mind that I don’t go camping all that often. The sites were big and well separated. The whole place had (I think) only 50 sites. The firewood was cheap (3 bundles for $10). Good trails. Nice clean lake. Clean bathroom/shower facilities.
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We did a lot of hanging out by the pond and had a ball throwing a stick into the lake for the dog. Slaney was running right up to the edge of the water and leaping out into the water as far as she could. She’s turned into quite a water dog.
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On the last day we hiked up to a fire tower – which offered stunning views of the area.
Here’s some video of the dog fetching a stick and swimming. It’s kind of long – about 7 minutes and the best jump is about 5:40 in. Slaney is still kind of new to water but every time we come to a lake she expects .. no demands .. that a stick be thrown into the water. She has a really funny quirk with sticks. It drives her nuts when a stick gets sandy and she’ll bark at the offending branch and often use her paws to roll it back into the water to rinse it off. Slaney is very good with her paws – a trait that comes from her boxer heritage I believe.