my shuffle off to buffalo

What an AWESOME weekend I had! And in Buffalo, to boot!

I flew in on Thursday night, and I knew it was going to be a good weekend because they gave me these cookies on the plane (chocobilly's chocolate chip cookies) that were so good I had to marry them. (You can call me "Mrs. Chocobilly" if you want to.) Alex picked me up at the airport and promptly plied with me a martini. Excellent!

Friday morning, we got up and went straight to Niagara Falls (which look like this): And they look like this when you're standing in front of them (and you're me):We went on the Maid of the Mist (the boat that takes you out into the falls, essentially) and we got super misty (a.k.a. soggy and bedraggled), despite wearing our attractive blue garbage bags:

After several hours at the falls, we made a beeline for the border, as I had never been to Canada before.

"Toronto or bust!" I shouted... in my head.

"Hey Alex, can we bring back prescription drugs from Canada?"

"No."

"Pleeeeeeease?"

"No."

"You take all the fun out of international travel."

"Ok."

However, in Toronto, we did engage in some illegal food eating! Ok, so mangosteens are not illegal in Canada (where we ate them), and unpasteurized cheese isn't illegal there either (but boy howdy is it TASTY), but I felt like a renegade fugitive... in a white Volvo and Batman t-shirt. I managed to add three stains to my skirt before we headed off to the Distillery district... where it started to look like maybe the nice weather wouldn't hold.

(insert ominous music here)

Sure enough, we got hit with some rain (just when we had parked about fifteen blocks away), so we had to sit and have a drink. Poor us.
The Distillery district was a lot like the South Street Seaport... except without a waterfront exposure. Apparently it had been this enormous distillery back in the day, and now it houses a bunch of art galleries, high end chocolate shops (yum!) and some fancy-schmancy restaurants.

I can offer you no photographic proof of my being in Toronto because both of the pictures Alex took of me are bad. But I was totally there!

We crossed the border again and, according to Alex, got the third degree from the border guard.

"Now, you're from Brooklyn and you're from Buffalo. How do you know each other?"

"Well, we went to high school together."

"In Buffalo?"

"No, in Connecticut."

Then the guard's head exploded, so we drove through unimpeded.

I wondered (silently) if I had to declare the mangosteen rind stuck under my fingernails. I also wondered if I had brought back prescription drugs if we wouldn't have been strip searched, since I'm such a bad liar. Luckily, it was a non-issue.

Saturday, we toured Buffalo. Now, of course Buffalo, in all its wisdom, didn't bother to tell us that a) there would be a street fair closing off traffic in one direction, b) there would be a Susan G. Komen race for the cure closing off traffic in another direction and c) there would be construction on a main roundabout, forcing us to go back in the direction from which we came. Needless to say, after all this hullabaloo, we had to go to the waterfront just to calm down.

This is not a great picture (it's better than the one in which I look like a gym teacher), but it's the first picutre we managed to get in together. And the reason we're in gym clothes (no, I don't usually wear spandex out on the town) is that we had gone running that morning in Delaware Park. (How awesome is my visor, by the way??)

After a good morning's run, a trip to the candy store is always in order. Especially when it's as cool as this one is:

(yeah, we both look a little, um, "special," but how cool is this ye-olde-timey soda shoppe?)

After an awesome dinner of grilled fish and vegetables, we capped the day off with a trip to my very first drive-in movie! (We saw Knocked Up, which was enjoyable, especially since Katherine Heigl was a few years behind both of us at Snootytown High School. Luckily we were in our own car when Alex started chanting "SNOOTYTOWN, REPRESENT!!" Oy.) This is kind of what it looked like. Kind of. (the black thing in the way is the windshield wiper)
Sunday was a laze-around kind of day (we had already pretty much seen all the sights Buffalo had to offer) so we looked at Alex's roses (repeatedly) and went to Lowe's to get him some under-the-counter lighting. Yeah, we're dorks.

I flew out Sunday afternoon, got some more AWESOME cookies, and got home a full hour before I thought I would. Can't complain about that!

All in all, an excellent weekend, with an excellent friend, excellent weather and excellent excellency!

This is one of my favorite pictures from the weekend -- it's Alex reading to one of the poles that keeps people from driving up onto the curb. They're good friends now.