Sunday, October 6, 2002
Sunday morning we went out for breakfast at a nice IHOP just south of Poughkeepsie. I hadn’t been to an IHOP in a year or so, so I settle in to enjoy all the varieties of syrup with pancakes from Monika (tasty) as well as the rest of Monika’s omelet (very good) and my own not insignificant Belgian waffle with blueberries and whipped cream. Once again I was stopped when the plates were finally taken away—it’s like “speak now or forever loose the food!”—and we drove over to walk around the Vassar campus.
The Vassar campus was somewhat larger than I had expected and quite pretty. As Sarah noted, the only ugly building on campus was the biology building but the others were all nice examples of different styles. The front of the library was very “Yale” like and Judson said it reminded him of a cathedral. It did in fact have some nice examples of gargoyles that I took pictures of. We saw very few people as we walked about, but it was Sunday morning, after all, and students are not known to be early risers!
After Vassar we stopped off in a curious grocery store. Some of the departments like the garden and flower section, the candy section, and the cheese section, were absolutely huge and offered an incredible variety of options. Other sections such as the dry cereal section where mere afterthoughts, occupying just one end of an isle and having only about 6 different basic cereals. What an interesting contrast. I found fat-free mozzarella cheese in brick form, which I’ve never seen anywhere else, so we bought two, and I had to drag Monika out of the flower section after she picked up two chrysanthemums and was headed back for more. They also had a nice “Haunted House” created in the garden section. It was dark and slightly spooky, and it was clear that someone had really put a lot of work into it. So we all had a great time shopping, but finally checked out and drove back to the apartment where we had to bid Judson and Sarah adieu.
We packed the flowers, cheese, wine glasses, and our travel gear into the Spirit and headed back home about 12:15 p.m. The traffic was light so we took the Garden State Parkway to the NJ Turnpike and got through all the toll booths without stopping due to our “EZ Pass”, which is certainly worth its “wait” in gold at those toll booths! Even with a half hour for a late lunch, we got home about 5:45-in time to watch the evening news. Copyright 2002 by Robert W. Holt