Thanksgiving in Ithaca

My sister and her husband flew down to be with my nephew and his girlfriend in Ithaca, NY for Thanksgiving this year.  I hadn't seen any of them for the holidays for rather a long time, so Hans and I drove some quiet lesser highways in Pennsylvania and New York to meet up with them on Thanksgiving morning.

The neighborhood where my nephew lives consists of a cluster of brightly painted cabins that look like a cross between an Alpine ski village and Dr. Seuss' Whoville.  Those cabins are do darn cute!  Atlas required much bribing with treats by the new man-folk but as you can see in the pictures below no canine can resist Hans' charms for very long!

Ithica is an incredibly picturesque town nestled in foothills surrounding Cayuga Lake, the longest (but not largest) of the Finger Lakes.  From our hotel room we had a pretty decent view of downtown, which was under a large-scale construction project.  We tried to go for a walk around the streets each morning.  I found that Ithaca has quite a lot of impressive street art, public artworks, and murals.  I don't think I saw a single electrical transformer box that wasn't cleverly painted.

My nephew took us on a tour of Cornell, where he works in one of their molecular biology[?] labs.  He uses a great big electron microscope to study yeast!  There was a room full of...I'm not sure exactly...mostly wire...and we were told that one of the professors had built an instrument that is so new and rare if you have one it's because you built it yourself.  Yeah, Science!

 

Cornell's earthquake simulation lab

One day we drove out to Corning, NY and visited their glass museum.  If we had timed our trip right we could have signed up for a glass-blowing class and made our own Christmas ornaments!  I very reluctantly resisted the gift shop.  I would not have minded walking out of there with some of the Waterford crystal that was on sale.

On the day before heading back to Maryland Hans and I went for a chilly walk around the lake-front trails along Cayuga lake.  Later that afternoon we went Christmas tree shopping at a farm that was hosting the local Newfoundland club, with small sleighs to pull tiny children and also your tree selection!

On one of the evenings we did some very hard-core wine tasting where we arrived at several wineries 30 minutes before they closed, and then proceeded to power through their offerings.  One of my favorite memories of the weekend, however, was the delicious meal we all shared at an Austrian restaurant up by Seneca Lake.