Day 24, July 8: Bellbrook, Ohio

Another leisurely breakfast with John and Beverly, this time featuring John’s homemade Egg McMuffin’s. We had more time talking and catching up, Patti did a load of laundry, so we would head into our next part of the journey with all clean clothes. Settling in and drinking coffee and tea was particularly appreciated as it rained pretty hard. As in most places in the country, they really needed the rain so it was appreciated.

In the early afternoon, we ran over to Courtney and Steve’s house. Steve, our nieces husband, had recently retired from nearly 50 years working in the tool and die industry. Dick‘s brother John had been bragging about how organized Steve’s tools and workbench were in his garage and we wanted to take a look at this masterpiece. Dick hopes to have gotten some inspiration from how orderly and beautiful Steve’s tools were arranged. We have quite a few tools that are not quite that well organized at home and hope to create some thing headed towards the beautifulness of this organization. Dick and Steve enjoyed talking tools.

We had to get back to the house to re-pack our car, because the next day we were headed off to New York City and wouldn’t need to bring all of our belongings in to the Airbnb.

In the late afternoon, we were pleased to go over to our great niece, Caetey and her husband, Tim’s house. We always love our time with them, but what we were really looking forward to was meeting there nearly a year and a half year-old daughter, Lena. Lena is such a bright light and smart little girl. She was quiet and shy at first as she scoped us out, but eventually warmed up to us.  We enjoyed having time playing peekaboo, helping her to jump and reading books and playing with toys together. A toddler is a very tiring kid to take care of! She went down to sleep with minimal fuss, which left us some more grown-up talking time. There were many tales to tell on both sides. We are so glad to have such a great relationship with both of them. It’s wonderful to see the two of them operating as such a strong team and really great parents.

Back to John And Beverly’s again for some late night chatting and then all needed to head to bed because we had to get up at the crack of dawn the next day.