A Night Out

Saturday is usually our designated "take out" night.  We usually order food from somewhere, pick it up, and eat it at home.  It gives us something to look forward to, supports businesses (though sadly, not many local ones since our gluten-free options are pretty limited), and gives me a break.  It's been a fun little routine and it's always nice when everyone can eat something they love.

We've hit up most of our favorites already, except for one place that just reopened for take out and our favorite little pizza and cookie joint a half hour away.  We'd been thinking that if we hit a nice day, it would be a good opportunity to go there, because we could tack on something as big as a trip to Letchworth, or just head to Geneseo for a little time in one of my favorite places.  We don't get out much these days, so even a walk around there sounded lovely.  It also would provide a nice place to eat our food, since eating in restaurants still isn't allowed.  There was a bit of griping from the boys about just wanting to eat at home and spending the evening at the house.  That blows my mind since we already spend so much time at home right now.  How could they not want to do anything else?!

But pizza and cookies was a good bribe, so off we went.  It was weird just stopping in and grabbing the food, since we almost always eat there.  All the customers had masks on, though keeping distance in the tiny space was hard!  The staff was not wearing masks (ugh) but it was nice to see the woman who almost always cashes us out.  We drove to Geneseo and parked off Main Street.  I've never seen the lot so empty!  We walked down the hill on to the campus, and fortunately there's a relatively new patio space outside a building that was completely renovated a few years ago.  It was the first thing we came to, conveniently, and it overlooked the College Green.

I will say that the walk down was a little odd.  The kids didn't want to wear masks, and honestly it was pretty easy to keep distanced, so we all went without.  But it's weird seeing people without masks and feeling the need to judge if they should be wearing them.  Oy.  Our pizza and wings were tasty, and when we were done, I dragged the boys on a walk.  There was one spot in particular I wanted to see, but first...

That building wasn't there when I was.  It's actually blocking the view of the (very ugly) lecture hall building I spent a ton of time in.  The green dome just in front of it was erected when I was a student.  This whole area was dirt for my first year or two, due to construction delays, after once being a beloved tree-filled space.  I don't think they really learned how to use it for much besides outdoor classes and frisbee until after I left.  Pretty sure the grass is a lot nicer now, too.

I missed most of tulip season due to being at home and the weather being chilly, so I was happy to see these.

When we got down to the space where I wanted to go, sadly the row of flowering trees was already spent.  It looked like this when I was a senior:

The trees are much bigger now, but they do still bloom brilliantly magenta.  Luckily, there was still this pretty pink one on the other side of the path:

You can see the other trees in the background.  They did have a lovely pink carpet of petals underneath them.

Pretty in pink

We walked through this tunnel, which is one of my favorite fall photo spots, and headed back to the van.

Sturges is always photogenic.  Although, I realized just as I was typing this that something looked different, and in looking at an old picture, I think they must have killed some ivy in the past handful of years.  It used to cover most of the far side and significant areas where the top windows on the left are bricked in.  The vines are there but no leaves.

The Seuss Spruce is getting all sorts of funky these days.  It grew funny on top due to ice storm damage, but now has a second, more normal top sprouting off!

This is Milne Library.  It was announced earlier this year that it would be closing for as long as four years.  Originally it was just going to be a semester to do some asbestos remediation, but then they moved up a planned full renovation so they could do everything at once, but it could take four years...and who knows how much longer now.  Oddly, I didn't see much happening on the site, but I did see asbestos remediation happening in a couple dorms, so maybe they're getting that done now while the students are gone?

This is the other end of the College Green, right in front of the building and green dome.  The trees were pretty.

It just so happened that there was another motivation to head down that way, but I wasn't sure we could pull it off.  There was a drive-through hot air balloon event happening at the airport in Geneseo.  It wasn't a launch, but they would have some balloons out and as the night got darker, they would glow as the flames shot up inside them.  It was still pretty early when we wrapped up our walk, and I knew it would be asking a lot to stick around until dark.  As we drove around the campus so we could look at the stadium and I could point out a couple things Jacob was asking about, I noticed the balloons were going up for the very start of the event.  I begged a little, promised it wouldn't take long, and we headed back toward the airport.

The airport is home to the National Warplane Museum (hence the plane that flew near our house in my last post originating there).  There were some old planes visible as we drove in.

Admittedly, there wasn't much else to see (although the sunset and dusk pictures a local photographer posted were stunning), but I did ask Craig to pull off into my old dorm parking lot so I could snap a picture from above.

I lived in two different suites in this building.  My last one was on the third floor, just above the back door just to the right of center in the picture.

By the time we got there, the fourth balloon was inflated.  I really didn't watch the airport nearly enough when I lived there.  Small planes took off periodically, though.

The sunset was starting to kick up while we were there, and in retrospect I wish we could have killed time until it got darker (you'll see why in a minute).

I caught one of the balloons' flame...but not much of a glow yet.

As we headed out of town and took 390 back north to Rochester, the sunset exploded.  It was gorgeous!

It took over so much of the sky and was one of the best ones I've seen in a while.  The pictures barely do it justice.  It made me so happy to have at least gotten out to see something different for a change, to feel a little normal for a while, and to have a chance to enjoy such a lovely sunset.  Considering a year ago this weekend we were in Toronto to try to get into the Raptors' Jurassic Park for game 6 of their conference final series, this definitely pales in comparison on the adventure scale.  But considering our lives for the last couple months, it was actually pretty great.  I never would have imagined that a year later we wouldn't even be able to get into Canada, so clearly the world has changed.  But for one night, things felt just a bit more normal.