Erie, PA- Thursday, August 7, 2025

     It has been an odd and quiet summer, trip-wise, especially with the cancellation of our Erie Canal cruise.  So when we heard that Julie's cousin Corey wanted to meet up with us in Erie, PA, we jumped at the chance to see him and to get away, even if for a brief time.   

    Julie had a doctor's appointment to check on the progress of her knee surgery this morning (She's doing great, by the way, and doesn't have to go back for a year now.)  Then we waited for Emma to wake up.  We took our time packing, had lunch at home and then headed towards Erie.

     Our first stop was our hotel in North East, Pennsylvania, which is a town in northeast Pennsylvania.  It's about 20 minutes from Erie, but we decided to make reservations here after Julie's brother John recommended it.  The selling point was it had a great pool with a water slide, and we knew Abby would love it.  The pool was empty when we got here but was quickly filling with kids and their families.  It was quite noisy, even when it was empty, but Abby soon got over that when she saw how much fun she could have in the water.The big water slide is probably too big for any of us to actually try, but there were lots of smaller things that Abby loved immediately.  Her favorite part might have been the small kid-sized water slide shaped like a tropical fish.  Even though it was quite a bit smaller than the big one, she still came down the slide so fast that one of us had to catch her as she exited the fish's mouth.  Scott eventually got in the pool too so that he could watch Abby while Julie took some time for herself in the hot tub.  

    We got out of the pool and got dressed and headed to Erie for our 5:00 dinner with Corey.  As we were heading into Erie, we called John who was coming with Christine and Julie's folks.  It turned out they had just passed us and were only a car or two in front of us.  We went into Texas Roadhouse and found that Corey was less than 10 minutes away.   We ended up being a party of twelve- Julie, Scott, Abby, Emma, John, Christine, Julie's folks, Corey, Brigette, and Brigette's brother and niece.  Corey and Brigette were in Pittsburgh for her family reunion/  The brother and niece had come up from Georgia as well for the reunion.  Corey had hugs for us all when he greeted us, and told Emma to "Stop getting prettier!"  "Why?" she said, partly sounding coy and partly sounding like she wasn't sure what he meant.  We had to wait a while for seats because our group was so large.  We were a little concerned about how fidgety Abby was going to be through the meal, especially when we saw how low on power her iPad was.  That wasn't an issue though, because she nodded off to sleep almost as soon as we sat down and slept for almost two hours, all through dinner.  The cool pool water had completely drained her energy.  It was very nice to see Corey again, and it's easy to say that he is Julie's favorite cousin.  Really, the worst thing about our time together tonight was that it was so short, but we had to expect that.  We took a group picture outside after dinner.  We will post a copy of it once we get one for ourselves from Brigette.

    Of course, when we got back to the hotel, Abby had gotten her second wind and even though she hadn't really had dinner, she was anxious to get back into the crazy pool.   Mom and Dad went in with her, but needing us less.  This afternoon, we had to catch her each time at the bottom of the fish's mouth slide, but that seemed fine because they do shoot out pretty fast and it's a hard surface beneath it.  This evening, however, she watched some other kids catching themselves and figured out how to do the slide on her own.  "I'm so proud of myself!" she said after doing it several times.

 

    Abby slipped and bumped her chin after she got out of the pool.  She seems to have tripped on the corner of a rug or something like that.  She's got a little scuff mark on her chin now and she blamed her mom for not putting her sandles back on.  Her sister got her an ice cream sandwich and that went a long way to soothing her.  Emma went to the fitness center while the rest of us rested.