Wednesday, August 10, 2022- Long Island

      We all able to sleep in today after yesterday's early rise (and tomorrow's, soon to come).   After breakfast, Abby got to swim in the hotel pool again before we got to visiting.

      Our first stop for the day was another visit with Uncle Rick and Aunt Sharon in nearby Holbrook.  We went to their house this time, and spent the time visiting with them in their living room, underneath their pretty skylights.  While we were there, their daughter, Debbie, came to visit with us too, while she was on her lunch hour.

     It was after 1:00 when we left Uncle Rick's place, and we needed lunch, so we stopped at a nearby Burger King.   We still had the afternoon to kill, so we went looking for Long Island potato salad.  We don't know why Julie's dad likes it so much, but he says it's just better.  We went to the Lake Delicatessen to get some and see if it is so.   We still had a while before we had something specific to do, so we set the GPS for a lighthouse that was nearby.  It is the Old Field Point Lighthouse.  It didn't appear to be open for tours, but it was a nice place for us to get out and stretch and walk around the grounds.  From there, we looked across Long Island Sound to Connecticut, and we saw numerous cormorants and gulls on the rocks nearby.   We would have liked to have found a public beach for Abby to have a little fun at but all of the ones we could find in the vicinity were for residents of those villages only.  While we were driving around, though, we saw a lot of cute houses, some very big expensive ones, and some  that were both.  Julie and Scott agreed that the colonial-style architecture that many of them had made them think of the houses around Williamsburg, VA.   Almost all of the houses we saw were big and many were huge.  Most of the streets were narrow. winding, and tree covered, while many of the properties we passed were behind tall hedges, trees, fences and gates, but we still got many glimpses of the houses as we passed through several "villages" including Setauket, Poquott, and Belle Terre.

     We headed back to the Premier Diner in Commack, where we met Gloria and Ron.  Gloria is the first wife of Julie's late Uncle David, and Ronnie is one of their sons.  Corey is Ron's brother, and it's not hard to hear the resemblance once either of them starts talking.  We had already noticed that diners seem to be a Long Island thing as we were driving around today.  The Premier Diner is apparently one of Gloria's favorites, and she was nice enough to buy us all dinner there.  She talked Julie and her folks into starting with the matza ball soup.  The diner was quite large, but there weren't many people there this Wednesday afternoon.  We were sat along the windows at the end of what is essentially a long hall way, which gave us a pretty quiet place to talk.  It also let Abby have a place to play on the floor past our table.  One of the biggest laughs of the evening came when Gloria brought up how she was going to bring potato salad up from Long Island to Western New York and we showed her that Julie's mom already had a container of potato salad in her purse.  After talking at the diner for a long while, we went to Gloria's house and continued the conversation there until it was going on 9:00.  Gloria was finally able to get a little bit of a hug from Abby as we were leaving. 

     Meanwhile, at home, Anna was continuing her first week at her new job at ECMC, and Emma went to the Erie County Fair with her other grandpa and grandma- Scott's parents.