*UPSTATE* New York

The past year has been an amazing year, for more reasons than one. Although we are on the trip of a lifetime, there is one experience that stands out about the same- family. Although the average Joe has either seen their family a lot or they have never seen them at all, our situation is a little bit different from both of those. What makes our family relationship so special? The craziest part stands out the most- I have only met my mothers side of the family- all 5 uncles, both grandparents, and all 6 children. On our fathers side, however, we had only met two people- his mother, and his brother. In fact, our dad himself hasn’t even met his entire family… until now! During the past year we knew all of our dads family, a drastic change from knowing none.

After our encounter with Niagara falls, we were on our way to meet our second cousins for the first time on our dads family. Our father had only recently found out that he had a cousin a short while ago, and we had already made plans to see them. Much of my time was spent looking out the window on the ride to a small town in New York and the rest of it was spent listening to a new Audio book. Our first encounter of our newest edition to the family was when a large silver truck was driving down the wrong side of the road towards us, blocking our exit. Although we should have known, as we were almost to our destination, we did not think that it was the reason we were driving down the dirt road in the first place- it wasn’t until seconds later when I was the first one to realize that it was Danny, our fathers cousin. I didn’t say anything, but everyone else in the car slowly came to the conclusion that it was really him while he waved and smiled- the last one being our father…

For one happy moment everyone realized that he was there. By that time, his truck was parked directly parallel to ours so we could see the reflection of our old excursion in his shiny metal. Danny was about 50 years old, about the same as our father, and had short black hair. His mustache was about an inch from bottom to top, wearing it the same style our dad liked to wear his in the fire department. We took off along the dusty road towards his house. Our father was using his headset to talk to Danny while we drove, and he told us a little bit about where we were going. It wasn’t long before we left the boring little dust town and were driving between the trees that soon presented themselves, intimidatingly leaning over our car to get a better look at our camper, which proudly read the exact words of “No Regrts” on the front.

As we drove past cabins and an odd Fallout-shelter style bunker, he told us about his tendency of having a “heavy foot” on the gas. As we soon found out later in our stay, he really meant that- he was driving up to 20 MPH over the speed limit, a seemingly 50 MPH distance between our slow camper-dragging car and his.

Anyway (back to the present), we were driving on the bumpy road (which had soon steadily shifted back into a dirt path) we tried our best to squeeze through the trees that were way too close to the one-lane narrow road for our comfort, getting more narrow as we went. After not too long, we were finally there. We had to do our regular setup procedure in front of his house, and were finally able to meet our family once we finished. At first glance through the well sheltered trees from the road, there was a nice house about two stories tall that was made of beautiful brown wood. A large deck wrapped around their house, allowing a great view into the large woods comfortingly offering protection from the benches seated on it.

Neither of the two children were there but his wife, Dee, was. Meeting her was a treat, as she had a great personality and was very pleasant to talk to. We were exorbitantly happy to be able to finally meet the family, but as it was already 10:00 at night, both families agreed that it was probably best to get a good nights sleep to be able to enjoy the following day as best as we could!

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