Ok, first of all, thanks to the people who have contacted or spoken to me requesting I get back to writing a blog. “We miss The-Prettiest-Girl-in-the-World and the boys. We miss your odd historical references that no one understands. We miss correcting all the grammatical and spelling errors.”

It was very heartwarming. We writers are delicate and very needy creatures, so thank you for your concern that I had actually died and gone to hell.

So, time to return.

Sooooo, I’m going to blog about a trip to New York we took in July. Beware: spoiler alert here – all of us survived physically, if not emotionally, so I’m sorry about killing any action/thriller tension.

I hate posting on FB that we are on vacation. You never know if a thief will read it and break in to steal my collection of D&D miniatures (or my best friend will sneak in and put rude post-it notes all over my office.)

So, this is simply a story of our adventures from July 3^rd to July 15^th, 2024, before the robots revolted, before WW3 broke out, and before they canceled Big Brother after 43 straight years.

Ok, sure the blog is almost ancient history but still, it’s something I want to share.  So, sit down, grab a cup of coffee and be ready for a blog dump so massive that it would clog any toilet.

A trip to NY? All of us? Me, The-Prettiest-Girl-in-the-World, both boys? We all had the same time off?

What?!

We had to do something! The-Oldest had graduated from UBC and The Youngest from high school. We needed to celebrate!

We decided to go on one last family vacation.

Oh, sure, maybe sometime in the future we’ll rent a house on a beach in Mexico and get together with The-Oldest, his wife and his piano, and The-Youngest will bring his twelve children and tired-looking wife but that’s still a few years off, so we wanted to have one while we all could still enjoy it.

Honestly, who knows where the boys will end up? They are both on their own journeys now. Both will have other priorities in life. That’s just the way it is.

So, back in January, we asked the boys where they’d like to go. Europe? Back to Disney World? The Bovingdon Tank Museum?

Sadly, no one but me was interested in the tank museum, (or for that matter, the castles in England, the Cathedrals in France, or the ancient Roman ruins in Italy – though there was some interest in the Red-Light District of Amsterdam, just not with me or mom).

They chose NYC.

Sadly, I think I have failed as a stepdad to fill them with the joy and wonder of moldy-smelling stone keeps and tanks displayed outside massive war museums.

I’ll do better with the grandchildren.

But NYC was a great choice. Not only was it an amazing city (my brother and I had visited it for 2 days in 2019), we had family to see – My NY cousins. One of them even offered her Manhattan apartment for us to stay in and both wanted to join us on a few of our adventures.

So, we made our plans.

Without making plans.

See, we found from our travels as a family that the impressive but perhaps obsessive Joe-planning was a bit much. No one wanted something like, 8:30, get up. 8:32-8:45 bathroom time. 8:45-9:00 self-reflection on how old I look in a mirror these days. 9:00-9:30 eat, make comments on how everyone hates the schedule, then put away the dishes. 9:30-10:00 dress, apply make-up, sunscreen, find where I put the keys, fill backpack with city survival supplies (list posted on the fridge), and remember to tell The-Prettiest-Girl-in-the-World how pretty she looks. 10:01… well, you get the idea.

Instead, we started with ‘What’s the ONE thing you HAD to do in NYC?’

Stay tuned for our plans.

However, the best and worst part of traveling is that you just can’t predict what will happen.

This adventure had a NY-sized dose of that.

What would you have chosen? What would have made a New York trip truly magical, or at least memorable?