Escape from New York

Annabelle and I took a long weekend in Rochester, where she interviewed on Monday as a finalist for a special program in the university's engineering school. I was leery of traveling to upstate New York in the middle of winter, but it never really occurred to me that we might find ourselves snowed OUT of Kansas rather than snowed IN in Rochester. That's precisely what wound up happening though.

The weekend itself was lovely. We stopped by the campus bookstore Saturday afternoon to buy more URochester swag. When we came out, we noticed several trees and light posts that had been "yarn bombed":







This made Annabelle inordinately happy. As she put it, "I might not knit sweaters for trees . . . but I would definitely be friends with people who would knit sweaters for trees!"

After a wonderful dinner with friends, we returned to the university to watch The Sixth Sense, put on by the Cinema Club. Unfortunately, they had to cancel due to technical problems, but we still enjoyed seeing the campus at night. I got a couple cool pictures of the library:





On Sunday we slept in, went to an Indian restaurant for lunch, and then set about exploring a couple of local malls. We were moseying through Lord & Taylors when I got a call from Delta that our flight home the following evening had been cancelled due to weather that hadn't even happened yet. My stress level went up at that point and stayed up for the rest of the trip, but I tried not to let that interfere with our good time.

I dropped Annabelle at the university late that afternoon for her pre-interview dorm stay. On my way back to the car, I stopped to take a picture of this adorable tank of some sort:





Back at the hotel, I got some very happy texts from Annabelle saying she was having a marvelous time, so I settled in to watch the Academy Awards but fell asleep before the big ones at the end of the evening.

Monday was a whirl of activity at the university--meals and class visits and departmental presentations and, of course, Annabelle's interview, which she felt went quite well. Later that day, we moved out of our hotel and into our friends' house, where we stayed up late tracking the weather in Kansas on our iPads and worrying about whether our flight the next day was really going to make it.

I have to give credit to Delta. I was tracking flights on the Kansas City airport website until late in the evening and starting again Tuesday morning, and it went something like this:

CANCELLED
CANCELLED
CANCELLED
DELTA
CANCELLED
DELTA
CANCELLED
CANCELLED

Sure enough, our flights on Tuesday went off without a hitch. I held my breath when we landed, but it was a pretty smooth landing:








Fred was there to meet us and take us home. The onramp to the interstate was rather sloppy, but the rest of the roads were pretty good considering the amount of snow that has hit this area in the past week:



I had Fred slow down on the drive home so I could snap a couple pictures of this place that I always admire:





I especially like their covered bridge:



Even though the trip home was a bit stressful, it was a great weekend, and Annabelle is confident that she has made an excellent choice for college: