Day 5: August 29, 1999
Last day at Mohonk

Walendo: On Sunday, Ellen and family spent the day at Mohonk and drove back in the afternoon. I'll let you put that stuff in. I think you did the scramble and so on. Don't forget your dad being charged for boarding 2 horses...

Ellen: Sunday at Mohonk turned out to be a fun day. In the morning, we met for breakfast around 9, and Dad had fun asking everyone whether they had brought their horses to the place for the weekend. Apparently, they'd mistakenly charged them for boarding two horses, which amused him to no end. There were a lot of surcharges, most of them Nancy & Keith's, many associated with arranged for a rental car and dealing with insurance, which the hotel said they'd take off. But Dad said the staff was very good about removing all the appropriate charges.

After breakfast, we met for a shuffleboard "tournament." Nancy, Keith & the kids decided to take off early, so they didn't join us, and Michael put the kids in the kids program. Mom & Dad beat Ann & me (the first contest Mom had won all weekend), and then Dad and I beat Ann & Michael. I was surprised that after Walendo & I had played and gotten the hang of it, it didn't help all that much, it still took a while to get the hang again. Then Mom & I played a round of tennis against Michael and Ann. Since dad's elbow was hurting, he videotaped us, and I'm expecting ESPN to pick up the event any day now. Mom & I went ahead 3-1 and again found a way to lose. Michael does well at the net -- he has a way of making you miss just by trying to stay away from him. During tennis, Nancy & the gang showed up to say goodbye, so we took a break and did all the hugs and such.

Mom & Dad exerting themselves

After tennis, the rest of the gang went off to have lunch, but I again wasn't hungry (still too much food) so I took my book and walked back up the Eagle something trail to the gazebo with the pretty view of the lake and the tower and the hotel and read for a while. On my way down (going through the woods rather than on the path), I went by the Granary, so I grabbed a plum and a scoop of ice cream. That was perfect, since it was easily accessible. I met the rest of the crew at the lunchroom and then Ann, Michael, Dad and I went on a "rock scramble" while Mom watched the kids. This turned out to be a lot of fun. It was a route up to the tower through all the fallen rocks & boulders. There was a lot of climbing inside the rocks and scrambling on big boulders, stuff I love to do. Near the very top, there were some places where we crawled up through two massive boulders that were so close together that you could barely fit. They'd put a narrow little ladder and it was hard for Dad and Michael to find their footing, while Ann & I with small feet had no problem. In general, Ann and I were moving along quickly, stopping to wait for Michael and Dad. It's good, though, that Dad was in good enough shape at 70 to handle it without much trouble. Danny had gone up it as part of the kids program and made a huge deal about it, but when we saw what it was, we realized he hadn't been exaggerating. Pretty impressive.

After that we got the car and headed home. I gave Walendo a call and we got together for dinner.

Walendo: Sunday evening, Ellen and I went out to dinner at Ben's Deli in Greenvale, and then went bak to the house to write a program to use to try to show Stan what programming is all about. We wrote a small C program that lets him type in a name of someone in the family and it prints out a sentence about them. (Ellen: Walendo also showed me his super-duper new suitcase that he bought today. It has wheels and a zillion other features. It looked really nice actually. Funny, though, how he buys a new suitcase for every trip, it seems.)

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