Actually, for some of the story to make sense, we have to start early. Last Saturday. Kate and I had a pretty fun day- just enjoying ourselves and a nice day off. Kate was having problems with her eye, though. It was hurting and kind of blood-shot all day. No bother, we thought. Just a weird contact thing or some such small problem. It got worse and worse through the night, and eventually we went to the ER early Sunday morning. Long story short, everything was fine. The contact scratched her eye up a bit, so she is on strict glasses-only orders for a week or so while it heals.
So, Wednesday comes around. Kate has to go to work, but she can't find her glasses. If she wears no glasses and no contacts, she can't see. But she can't put a lens in her right eye because it's all scratchy. And she can't just wear one contact, because that messes with your vision (or so I hear). So, my dear wife being very resourceful, she just puts a contact in her left eye and gets an eye patch to put over the right.
(artist's rendition)
So, after work, Kate and I headed off to Niagara. It's an hour shorter to go through Canada, so we headed off to the land of Poutine and kilometers. Crossing the bridge from Michigan to Canada was an ordeal. There's a 4 dollar toll just to cross the bridge, which felt kind of excessive. The lanes were really narrow and there were trucks getting really close. It was stressing me out.
When we got to the border, the border patrol guy asked Kate if she was smuggling parrots into Canada. Ha Ha! Pirates! After a very long drive we got back to America. The American border patrol was way less fun.
We got to the house in Niagara Falls late Wednesday night. I took a few minutes to get Grandma Payne's rolls going, since they rise overnight. Thursday morning, John and I got up and went to Walmart for some last minute things, then started making dinner. We made some Dad Payne stuffing (butter, onions, bread, sage, and no other ingredients) and got everything cooking.
Grandma Payne's rolls, for those of you who don't know, are baked in a muffin tin. You put three balls of dough in each cup and they rise together and form beautiful pull apart rolls. Like this:
But Kate and I only own one muffin tin, and we forgot to ask John and JaNae to bring more, so we had to improvise. We had a pie tin that we were going to use for pie later, so we figured, why not make a bunch of dough balls and put them in the pie tin? I did this, and it sort of turned into a giant roll.
Pretty darn tasty, though. Here's the whole spread, giant pie-roll and all
It was a heck of a Thanksgiving. After dinner and before pie, we walked to the falls. While the walk itself will be part of another post, I thought I should try to post one of my terrible pictures of the falls here. These were all taken on my iPod since my camera died recently. (Thankfully, I found a good one on Black Friday so I'm back in business.)
The next day, we went to an aviary on the Canadian side of the border. It was really close and we were able to just park on the street on the American side and walk over. The place was really neat and I think deserves its own post. So, till then!
