Day1- Sound Beach, NY

Last night, I began to pack for our trip.  Of course Katie had been packing for a couple of days trying to make sure that she was prepared.  Many years of Boy Scout camping gave me the skills to pack on short notice.  Going on a weekend campout?  I'm ready in an hour.  Going on a 5-week vacation?  I'm ready in five hours.  We'll see whether my fast packing is the bane of an otherwise well prepared trip.

I must mention that it would have taken me longer to pack had Katie not been generous and ironed all of my wrinkled clothes (a result of me NEVER ironing my clothes) while I got all my things together.  I tried to find a good technique of packing the clothes to preserve all of Katie's hard work and settled for the bundle method.  The theory of the method sounds good, but only time will tell whether it actually works.  We ended up going to bed around 22:30.  All the excitement of the trip kept us awake for a while.  We kept thinking of things that we needed to pack.  Neither of us got good sleep.

Waking up, we spent some time finalizing the packing.  Our problem? Weight restrictions.  Southwest allows customers to check baggage for free up to 50lbs.  Using our bathroom scale, our largest piece of luggage was 60lbs.  After shifting some goods around, we got it close.  Big thanks to Chris, Mandy, and Blue (6 months) Comstock for taking us to the airport so we could leave our cars parked at home and not pay the $9/day fee.  Blue got restless halfway through so they parked and walked in with us.  He was really happy seeing all the activity.  After checking in the baggage, we found out that our largest luggage weighed in at 52.5 lbs so we got stuck with the $25 surcharge.  It will get more interesting when we fly with Olympic Airlines which restricts the baggage to 44 lbs.

As seen by the GPS track below, the 2.5 hour flight to Long Island went very well.  We actually arrived 20 minutes early, maybe due to catching some tailwinds.  Thankfully, Greg conveniently works about 5 minutes away from the airport, so as soon as we landed he was there to pick us up.  The Islip airport is small and clean, making it easy to get off the plane and out.

The weather up here is quite different from the weather in Florida.  For the past month Florida has been hot, but Fall finally arrived with cooler, sunny weather.  New York was having the same kind of weather but recently was hit with a dreary spell.  Florida doesn't have dreary weather often, so while most would be miffed by it not being sunny, I'm grateful for the change.

We arrived at the Steeves homestead which is a small summer home on a hill (a geographic feature that Florida doesn't know).  The weather, topography, and wonderfully lush vegetation reminded us of our old Kentucky home.  The combination of elements brought back fond memories of campouts.  After dinner, we walked around Port Jeff while it drizzled a fine mist that almost appeared like snow (another phenomenon that Florida doesn't know).  Coming back to the house, we turned on the TV to watch our beloved Cardinals play against UCONN.  The game is still going on after many injuries with us losing by 5 points and 2.5 minutes to go.  Regardless of the result, tomorrow promises a fun day in the city that never sleeps.