Wednesday

Back home in Bama we have this membership deal with AMC Theaters that lets us go to THREE movies per week each month for $20. While we seldom go to three movies a week, we most often catch two movies per week, usually one that we really wanted to see and another that was a bit of “sleeper”. However, now I’ve  discovered the 3 D movies , and they are really fun to watch! Anyway; even if only two movies per week that is 8 movies per month for $20! Popcorn extra of course!

So we found a AMC theater “Just down the road a piece”, translation 25 miles and two  mountain passes, in the beautiful town of Allegheny, which happens to be home to St Bonaventure college! The movie was long and sort of good “once upon a time in Hollywood”, with lots of big name stars(Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tarantino, Luke Perry, Margot Robbie) but the real star was the seating!  EVERY SEAT IS A PERSONAL RECLINER WITH ADJUSTABLE HEAT!

Now that makes a 3 hour movie move faster! We enjoyed the movie, popcorn, scenery and boy did I enjoy that seating! I hope they add one of these to our AMC in Pensacola !

Anyway back over the mountains to camp we go!

THURSDAY: NIAGARA FALLS and Italian Dinner Date

We couldn’t resist Niagara Falls and since we are “just down the road a piece”, off we went! My plans were to take Debbie to a nice Italian restaurant for a birthday week dinner and we went thru small town after small town with lots of  eating establishments ending with an “O” or “A” so I was sure we would find one for us to celebrate at. We got to the falls much later than we thought we would and it was PACKED!

We got into the 1,000 car parking lot and found a space! OOPS, that had to be an electric plug car! In fact there were two electric spaces in this huge lot, right up close to the Falls! One was taken by a VOLT which qualifies but can also easily run on gasoline, the other lonely plug was just waiting…waiting. Now here we are demanding car makers make electric cars, and then using perks to encourage them but few takers! The VOLT really didn’t need a charge point but it occupied it for SEVERAL hours, meanwhile if there were electric cars needing a charge, only one charge point was open and available out of 1,000 parking spaces (you can see the issues!)

After viewing the Falls and photographing boats going into and under the falls we retreated back to the Parking lot where the turn over of cars had been pretty fast but the two electric spots were unchanged. Looking at our maps we thought we found a route to take us back to some of the ethnic food we had found but before we knew it we were heading south out of the area we had identified for dinner!

I did locate a small town of Hamburg on the way back South and in that town there was a really nice establishment with red tablecloths, ethnic food, candles,  and a bar out front! This was going to be the site! The waitress was a sweet Italian girl, she made us an order of bread and stuffed mushrooms while we looked over the menu and we were the only ones in the dining room! This was great! The waitress warned us that the food was cooked fresh and portions large and this was news well received by two hungry campers!

Deb ordered Italian stuffed Hungarian Peppers over angel hair pasta, I got spaghetti and ½ lb meatball. When she came out with these mountains of pasta, I could see we were going to be well fed! And then the unexpected BIRTHDAY SURPRISE HAPPENED!

As she was setting this huge platter down in front of Deb, this plate filled with a steaming volcano of food started to slide off the platter, Deb’s quickly tried to catch it in mid air but couldn’t quite get there and 3 lbs of pasta, peppers and meat flew onto her new shirt and lap!  There was nothing anyone could do to save the culinary treat! Carefully they moved us to another table, prepared a new dinner for Deb, swabbed off the spaghetti sauce, Deb and I shared my dinner which was easily big enough for two and we left promising the waitress that we were so sorry for her bad luck and that we would still have the ability to laugh about this later!