14th Annual Sisters Weekend -- Day One

My sisters (Holly, Carol, Niki) and I have been taking an annual long-weekend trip for 14 years. Each year, we go to a different city. We laugh, we eat, we sightsee, we eat, we talk, we laugh. Three of us now live in Lansing (which wasn’t the case for the first 12 years). The fourth lives in Las Vegas. For financial reasons, Niki (the Vegas sister) wanted to combine her annual trip to see my mother with our annual sisters weekend this year, so she suggested a road trip, which we have never done before. And just where does one drive from Lansing, we all inquired? Why Cleveland, of course!

After Niki’s arrival, she suggested we also drive to Niagara Falls, which to my surprise, is only five hours from Lansing by car. Who knew? So, early last Tuesday afternoon (yes, I realize that isn’t a weekend and yes, morning would have been better, but we can never seem to get it together very early) we headed out with Holly’s new toy to guide us — a GPS system by Garmin (she calls it Garminetta Martravius Johnson).

Our first stop was Port Huron for lunch before crossing over into Canada.

Here are my sibs in the parking lot of the restaurant. We had Holly’s Yukon packed to the hilt including that additonal storage container on the back.



We were going just great across Canada with the assistance of Garminetta, when she suddenly seemed to lose her way. The little car in the picture is supposed to stay on the road, but it kept drifting off to the left, then the right, while Garminetta kept “recalculating.” In the end, the road disappeared and the little car was lost on a totally white screen. We finally figured out that she must not have maps of Canada loaded into her memory. Luckily, we had an Atlas as a backup and we never lost our way.

Unfortunately, by the time we reached Niagara Falls, it was getting late and our hotel was near the Buffalo airport. We wanted to have dinner in the Skylon tower overlooking the falls, so we drove right by (one quick pic out the window) and into New York, where Garminetta quickly reestablished her bearings and guided us to the hotel.

Normally, the first thing we do when we reach our hotel is exchange gifts, but this year, we changed clothes as fast as we could and headed back to Canada.


It was dark by the time we reached the Skylon Tower. The evening was clear and the view was really quite spectacular. Most of my pictures of the view are blurred, but you can get the idea.






Most of my attempts to take pictures of my sisters were marred by a reluctance on their parts to take my photography seriously.












In the end, we did get some nice sister shots with much trading of cameras so we all had pictures of everyone.





When we returned to the hotel, we exchanged gifts.















Way back, on our third or fouth year, we visited Chicago. After watching the chickens hatch in the incubator at the Science ansd Industry Museum, Holly and I bought wind-up chicks and raced them across the hotel room floor. Wind-up toys became a tradition after that (we have Mickey Mouse feet, little cars, bunnies, easter eggs, you get the picture). So when I saw the racing grannies with their walkers, I couldn’t resist.
I’m not sure Niki (the young sister) appreciated it. She always asks us not to discuss our ailments. She doesn’t want to know what lies ahead. We tell her we only bring her along so she can tell us if we had a good time or not. We also tell her that eventually she will be pushing us in a triple wheelchair. She is not amused!


End of Day One

Here are links to the rest of the articles:
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four