So, a couple weekends ago we had a fantastic trip to the area known as the “Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania”. It’s quite beautiful there.

See? The plan was part of a grand surprise for Matthew’s dad John’s 65th birthday. His wife Judy had planned a surprise trip back to PA, where John and Matthew had spent many a vacation together as youngsters. Everything was all hush-hush and mum’s-the-word and John didn’t even know he was going anywhere until 5 in the morning when Judy woke him up out of a sound sleep and said, “Hey! Get up lazy bones! We’re going to the airport!” Or, at least, that’s the way she tells it. We were in on the plan, and had given John a series of fake-outs saying we were driving down to a book show in Georgia (GEORGIA!) that weekend, so that’s where he thought we were headed. We were all very excited for another vacation (seems we’ve been doing a lot of these lately…).

However, before we left, we had to deal with the Volume 27 mailing. For those of you who aren’t subscribers, Volume 27 is an oversized poster that condenses 4 walls and a ceiling’s worth of mural into one piece of paper. Mad genius, I say! Or just plain mad.

We’d been putting off the mailing for many reasons, not the least of which was a lack of willingness to unleash all those mailing tubes in our house.

That’s only 1/5 of them, by the way. Also (I believe I have mentioned this before) Matthew has a tendency to act like a complete lunatic when we put together mailings, presumably to keep himself from poking his own eyes out in unbridled boredom. This was an equally important deterrent for me. So, when it came down to it, I made him leave the house with the kids and I rolled and packaged them all. It saved us all some agony. So if you have any complaints about how your poster was rolled, please contact me directly. If Matthew finds out how many of you are dissatisfied, he’ll insist on helping next time.

Once they were all packaged, we still had to put stamps on them and sort them into domestic and international and home delivery piles for each of the subcategories – expiring, soon to expire, and not expiring anytime soon. We had so many different piles that we had to enlist some free child labor to help us out.

She proved surprisingly capable. I’m working on teaching her how to use a stapler, though. In preparation for SPX, we are going to need to make a boatload more books.

Once that was completed (not even in the wee hours!) we were free to head north. Along the way, we saw lots of rain:

lots of power lines:

and a surprising number of cold, wet chickens:

Our arrival was a great surprise for John, who had been secretly moping in the grey gloom when we got there. Kato celebrated the reunion by learning how to sit up.

Alden chose, instead, to attack John with a pillow.

She is truly inscrutable.

There were too many highlights to go into too much detail. But we all had a pretty great time. Except for Kato, apparently, who couldn’t even summon a little bit of a smile for the family photo.

He’s usually such a sweet little guy, so rarely anything but smiley, that I was a little worried. I asked around, seeing if anyone had noticed the sudden change in his demeanor. Judy suggested it might have something to do with what she discovered John feeding him earlier:

Not the baby food…

the salt!

Apparently he downed 4 full shakers before he was satisfied. You just can’t trust grandpas. They will just give give give without question.

We did some hiking, though Kato’s attitude did not improve.

“Turkey Path?” he said. “That sounds like it would be good with some salt!”

A highlight I cannot leave out was going out to dinner at a local dive. Quite local. Quite divey. When John went to scope out the place (after having been turned away at a less-local, less divey sort of place that was full) he passed a guy in the bar playing pool who was yelling at his cueball not to “f**ing go into that goddamn pocket, you f**ing c**sucker!” We thought it was the perfect sort of place to bring our newer, saltier baby boy. He could learn so much.

But the other draw was that this place is known for its prime rib. And prime is right. The four of us ladies ordered the “King” size to share.

The picture is so blurry because Matthew couldn’t hold still so furiously was he shaking with envy. He had ordered a calzone, the foolish, foolish man. The piece of meat was literally 6 inches thick. And dee-li-ciousssss.

Heading out to leave early the next morning, Matthew managed to get us impossibly wedged between a rock and a log in the tippy edge of the steeply sloping driveway. He tried to imply that it was because of the added weight that resulted from my bulking up on the King cut the night before, but I think it had more to do with his imperfect driving skills. At any rate, we were hopelessly stuck. No amount of gravel under the front tire would pull us out.

I know this doesn’t look bad, but what you can’t see is the precarious 5 foot drop to the immediate right of the car. We were too distressed to take any more pictures. The day was saved by some local dudes who saw us, climbed out of their truck, did a little pushing to no avail, and returned 10 minutes later with a bigger truck and a chain. We owe them our lives.

We tried to give them some money to buy themselves, say, a King cut of prime rib, but they refused. This is the sort of out-of-the-goodness-of-the-heart that one finds in the back woods of Pennsylvania. Thank you, guys.

And so ended our trip to Pennsylvania. In spite of the rain, we managed to have a really great time. There’s nothing better than just lounging around with the folks.

Unless, of course, it’s beating them into submission.