Ocean Grove Part I

We were on the road by 9:30 am Saturday and had an easy ride to Bedford, Pennsylvania arriving around 5 pm.  For years we have passed the Jean Bonnet Tavern along the Turnpike and I was curious!  So this year, I made a reservation and we drove a few miles along the Lincoln Highway for a wonderful dinner in an inn that had been there for 250 years.  My crabcake sandwich was the very best ever!  Afterwards we drove to town and enjoyed seeing the historic houses and churches.

Sunday: I really wanted to go to church after a somewhat stressful week.  Jim stayed at the motel, communing with RH Charles and one of his 1887 sermons.  I went to the Bedford Lutheran Church where I was warmly welcomed and felt God's word to me in liturgy, sermon, and the Eucharist.

Bedford Lutheran Church

Katie's tomato salad

Strandvue

We were the first ones to arrive at the Strandvue, our ocean front "cottage" with its 1880 marker.  We claimed the third floor turret room with its privacy and view.  The others arrived within the hour and we had a great spaghetti supper followed by the traditional Day's Ice Cream trip.


Monday: Before going to bed we used an hour of A/C with a noisy window unit and then we opened the windows to get the ocean breeze.  By morning it was almost cold.  We took S and A out for a very early breakfast treat and then the rest of the day was full of kid play,  reading, great eating, and some beach time.  We had a pretty hectic trip to Shop-Rite with a broken shopping cart with R riding and a sleeping A in the car and the difficulties of finding anything in a huge grocery store where there were shelves of Kosher meat and I wanted a pork roast for pulled pork.

Michael fixed a delicious steak dinner which we ate outside on the deck.  We made our nightly trip for ice cream.


I had prepared 14 numbered baby photos before we came, one of each of us copied in black and white. Everyone tried to decide who was who.  It was great fun making the choices and great fun reading the results.  The two moms, Laura and Susan, had perfect scores.  The dads--not so much. Jeff, our mathematician, had figured out the plurality scores, and they were correct except in the case of the three Conway boys whose baby photos were pretty similar!

Laura presented us with the Shutterfly albums she had made with photos of "Jim and Mary" from high school days to the present time.  A wonderful gift!

A the escape artist

Tuesday:   Another early morning trip to the downtown bakery this time with J and A.  We had to wait for it to open but it was worth the wait.

 It rained much of the day so Michael took the kids to a movie.  Jeff and Susan had to go back to Princeton for the second of their rabies shots (that's another story!).  There was plenty of quiet time until it came time to do supper and it was clear my effort at pulled pork was not going to be ready even after hours in the crock pot.  So we headed back to Shop-Rite, bought burgers and hot dogs, and went to work.

Dan arrived on the 6:16 train and we were all together for supper and ice cream.

Almost everyone at Day's for ice cream