A first walk around Galeville in a fine fall

The rain stopped enough last weekend for my dear wife Karen and I to fulfill our promise to Ellie B aka Dogamous Pyle to put on the leash and take our first loop around the block since moving into the Liverpool neighborhood of Galeville. I’ve noticed on my drives that one of the nearby streets…

Don’t worry Ellie B, you’re coming with us

After we got the keys and poked our head into A Bitty Better in the Liverpool neighborhood of Galeville, my dear wife Karen drove the two miles down the road to leave me back off at the library to finish my Friday work day. Then came three days of packing up our lives at the…

Feeling fallish at Onondaga Lake Park

The green held on for a good, long time at Onondaga Lake Park.’ As I took my latest lunchtime stroll from the Liverpool Public Library, it looked way more like fall had arrived on the shores of Onondaga Lake Park. I had to pull my iPhone 6 from my pocket as I circled on my…

Meet the Liverpool Public Library’s Flat Stanley Grace Flener

Flat Stanley has been around for while. In fact, the character came from the mind of children’s book author Jeff Brown and pen of Tom Ungerer in 1964. I came across the little dude, though, at my job as communications specialist at the Liverpool Public Library. As part of the Flat Stanley Project, the Pinckneyville…

We wind up our Freedom of the Seas journey with a photo potpourri

I hope you’ve enjoyed cruising along with my dear wife Karen and I from Port Canaveral and back. I the last two weeks, I’ve attempted to bring you the best of Freedom of the Seas, inside and out, including our stops at Coco Cay and St. Thomas and St. Maarten/St. Martin. We watched with wide…

St. Maarten, St. Martin both feel welcoming from Freedom of the Seas

When we got off the Freedom of the Seas with our group of friends, my dear wife Karen and I were in St. Maarten. How could we not feel welcome with the colorful splash that we all saw just off the dock as we walked to where they pointed us? The line of people were…

Royal Caribbean can’t quite drop you off at Cocoa Cay, the island it owns

There are more than one cruise vacations on the Royal Caribbean International lineup in which Cocoa Cay is a port of call. Except I wouldn’t exactly call this tiny island off the Florida coast a port. The waters are too shallow to dock Freedom of the Seas. Any ship on the cruise line that owns…

A theater big enough for all sorts of shows fits Freedom of the Seas

The Arcadia Theater is a busy room on Freedom of the Seas. Our happy group went there after dinner every night. Royal Caribbean International made sure to put a fitting exclamation point of a showroom on this big ship of theirs. To me, it looked like the nicely decorated joint holds around 1,000 people in…

Somehow the Freedom of the Seas seems roomy

With somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 folks on Freedom of the Seas, I had the notion that the ship would seem more crowded than any of the cruises I’ve taken with my dear wife Karen. Not so. Somehow, the space planners made this shop seem roomy, from the promenade lined with shops and restaurants…

On Freedom of the Seas, we take off on our biggest cruise yet

My dear wife Karen and I have enjoyed many fantastic cruises together on a bunch of really nice ships. I believe the biggest we’ve been on were the two that took us to Bermuda, the very first I ever took, which left from New Jersey, and the second out of the Port of Baltimore. Different…