Last Weekend In Ithaca

Lack of blogging was due to my being out of town with the family for an event.

One of Abby's friends from camp, who had attended her Bat Mitzvah here in Michigan, was having a Bat Mitzvah and Abby had been invited. The Bat Mitzvah was very nice and she did a good job with the reading.

Both of the girl's parents are professors at Cornell and are seriously geniuses with a capital G, and nice people to boot.

They also happened to be a couple of the few politically-conservative leaning profs at the University along with a few others, one of whom I had hoped I might meet at the event.

So we piled in the car and drove to Ithaca, New York. On the way there we went through Ohio and Pennsylvania and finally arrived.

We stayed with some friends of the girl's family there, who were very, very, nice and welcoming indeed, and we had some great conversations with them during our stay. The man of the house is a famous artist and a serious golf aficionado and it was a treat to chat with him and see some of his work. The wives got along great, and my kids absolutely adored their daughter who is a college student. Really great people who went out of their way for us.

At the Conservative (movement rather than political, it was highly lefty to say the least) synagogue, when talking to people I managed to meet another conservative-politically speaking fellow and we had a nice chat indeed. He then introduced me to none other than William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection, who I knew was a good friend of the Bat Mitzvah girl's parents and I had been hoping to meet there as I've enjoyed reading his blog quite a lot.

It was nice to briefly chat with Mr. Jacobson, and if you're not reading his blog on a regular basis, you really should be doing so.

Ithaca in northern New York is really in some very scenic country and is a nice University town, it looks a lot like northern Ontario - lots of lakes, very green, and sparsley populated outside of the town.

Then we drove home through Ontario, crossing at the Rainbow bridge by Niagara Falls. Stopping for lunch in Toronto in the later afternoon we made it home late Sunday.