Company & a road trip.

I got a call yesterday from my brother Paul, for those of you who don't know-he's my older brother who lives in Hawaii. Not a bad place to live believe me! He and his wife Lisa live there with their three grown children Christopher who is newly married to Nan (we went to their wedding last summer) our Goddaughter Amanda and our other niece Alyssa who is the youngest of the three. All the of them happily living such busy lives that when Paul decided to take some time off this fall to come and visit, the only one in the whole family that could squeak away for a quick vacay was Amanda.

It's good we're seeing them so soon, it's only been a bit more than a year since we were all together. I would rather have them all visit, but at this point I take anyone who can come and in the mean time maybe plans will change and some of the others will come.

The preliminary plan is this; they are going to fly into JFK and spend some time with my little brother Gerard and Denise and their kids, Sydney, Alexandra and my Godson Gerard. After spending time hanging out with the NY branch of our family and quote "eating some clams", then it's off to Washington DC by Amtrak. We're gonna drive up (me, Mom, Bill and our son Matthew should be on his days off ) and spend a day or two seeing the sights since my niece wants to and that's good enough for us!

I'm hoping Gerard, Denise and kids will decide to either drive or jump a train and join us..*hint hint!

Paul and Amanda want to go to the Smithsonian, I wonder if they realize it's about 10+ city blocks long in total and it would probably take a year to actually see it all; anyway it will be fun regardless.

Then back to my house - mom's next door so my brother can spend some time with us and Mom, she's getting up there in age and that's a priority for him.  So what's in Virginia besides us? There's open spaces, clean air, the changing of the leaves, crisp apples on my trees and there's always the pork!