robbo and leeazaa’s travel adventures

When we first arrived in Texas, Uncle Bob knew that he was coming to Chicago with us however what he had only found out was that our cousin Kim had stumbled upon a real estate listing of the original family farm in Scottsville, New York. Uncle Bob made contact with the owners – Bob and Nancy Pierson and before long they had invited us to come stay with them at the farm.

What can we say, it was an astounding feat of generosity and hospitality on their part but furthermore they had oodles of Miller family history to bestow upon us…. needless to say Uncle Bob and Aunt Luci were completely gob-smacked and years of unanswered questions were FINALLY put to bed thanks to the memorabilla that Bob and Nancy had saved and combined with the the historical places in Scottsville which often had tributes to the original Millers for what they had contributed to the town.

First up, the house is magnificantly restored and maintained and where possible the original furniture and decorations have been used.

The front porch

on the front porch

view from where the windmill used to be

The side, below the "best room in the house"

The sun room again...

Interestingly there is a hops bush located across the street. We aren’t sure if that’s something the Miller family planted but Uncle Bob is going to take some of them back to Texas to plant and hopefully find a way to get it to me back home so I can make a brew out of it.

The hops bush across the street

Hops!!

The garden and the view to the neighbors property is stunning as well.

The restored pergola out the back

The orginal barn

We visited the family plot where 8 of the ancestors are buried.

The Miller monument at the family plot

The headstones. Still in reasonable condition

Aunt Luci, Uncle Bob and Nancy pouring over photos

We have also seen the original Miller house before they moved into Fraser Farm.

Original Miller house

The North Road Farm

The old schoolhouse where Aunt Laura taught

Out to dinner with the Piersons

inside the school house

This post is a little rushed as we are about to go to the airport, but we would like thank the Piersons immensly for having us in their home and letting us eat their delicious food.

Rob

Ma & Pa, we will email you more pictures when we get to New York City, we need to organise them a bit as we have heaps! Hopefully this blog post will keep you happy until then.

Tags: family, new york

Oh boy what a day we had yesterday!!

We have been staying in Rochester, New York which is a beautiful place. Rob will tell you more about that in his post soon about the Miller family history.

We all took a break from the genealogy and went on a day trip to Niagara Falls which is a 1.5 hour drive West of Rochester. There was also a bonus to going there as I would also get to meet my second cousin who I didn’t know existed until we started planning our trip to the USA.

After getting the 3rd degree from the Canadian Border Patrol Officer as we drove over the Rainbow International Bridge, and we were in Canada!

We had then arranged to meet up with my cousin, Maureen and her husband Norm. They very graciously endured a 3.5 hour drive from Stow, Ohio (south of Cleveland) to meet up with us. The original plan was to go to their house to stay with them for a bit, but unfortunately getting to their town was impossible without a car of our own (and we are still too apprehensive to drive around ourselves in America). So, I was really glad that they were willing to drive to the Falls to meet us.

Maureen and Norm were great people and it was fantastic to hear the Scottish accent again! The only downside of them having such a long drive was that we were only able to spend an hour or so with them over lunch. But hopefully we can catch up with them again in a family reunion they are having in the South of France in 2010!!

Eating our Lunch by the Falls. Left to Right: Leeane, Maureen, Norm, Uncle Bob and Aunt Luci

Maureen and Me

Posing by the Falls

Next up was the Falls. And gee-whiz, they are incredible!! The noise, mist cloud and sheer volume of the water rushing over the cliff is just awe-inspiring. They also have a natural rainbow which you see in the middle of the waterfalls which is marvelous.

The Rainbow on the American Falls

The Horseshoe Falls - amazing!

American Falls and the Rainbow Bridge

By the mist

Lastly, we went on the very famous Maid of the Mist boat tour which stupidly takes your right into the belly of the Horseshoe Falls – in the middle of the mist cloud. It is really gusty in there and we got soaked even with the raincoats on – but we all had such a ball.

Before: Lining up to get on the boat

After: The Drowned Rats

That little boat is where we were headed

So all in all, a very memorable day for all of us – but I think particularly for me as I got to meet my cousin – really special!

Leeane

Tags: family, new york, niagara falls, rochester

Sadly it is time to say goodbye to Chicago and the family connection here. I wish we had a few more days here but I could easily say that about every place we’ve been too. On the upside our next destination is Rochester NY and Niagara Falls which should be a corker, the place is loaded with family history and we are actually staying in the original ‘Miller’ family farm. Furthermore, there’s talk that it might be haunted so its a good thing I brought my ghost-busters shirt to the states with me!

The past few days since the last blog post have been swollen with fun, much like my foot when I got gout after the weekend. In that case ‘fun’ was more akin to ‘agony’. Oh yeah!

The Natural history museum of Chicago looks like it could well be the main rival to the New York equivalent we are yet to visit. It is MASSIVE, we spent the best part of an afternoon there and still only managed to see about 50% of the exhibits before succumbing to muscle fatigue.

Natural History Museum

Much to the museum’s credit, the amount of ‘kiddy-fication’ is minimal and the exhibit presentations are unreal.

Animal Pic 1

Animal Pic 2

spot the monkey...

The artic is now in Chicago apparently...

Leeane and me

sue the t-rex

Even the view from the museum window kicks ass….

view from the museum window

That night we stayed in downtown Chicago so we could have a full day to explore the city and the sights.

Navy Pier is just down the road from the hotel, on the downside a thunderstorm was brewing so it started to rain as we were walking to the pier. On the plus side the rain scared off most of the people so we had the place to ourselves.

Navy Pier Ferris Wheel

Using all my sensibility, I figured the safest place to be with a thunderstorm warning looming was 30m (100 ft) in the air, in a super-massive metal structure. Good view though…

view from the "lightning rod" wheel

Leels on the pier

I had it in my head that the Planetarium that we didn’t have time to see yesterday would be the best thing in the world….WRONG! Well, to be fair I’m sure it is for anyone aged between 8 and 12, unfortunately that wasn’t mentioned in the brochure. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t for the 5km (3 mile) walk to get there, that wouldn’t have been so bad either had it not been for the gout that I was still going through.

It did give us an ample oppurtunity to see the cool sites of Chicago on the way though…

Riverwalk

In Grant park we saw what looks like a giant liquid-metal terminator re-forming – The uber T-1000!

Shiny metal thing

About half way down to the Planetarium is Buckingham Fountain.

Buckingham Fountain

The following day Uncle Bob picked us up from downtown and we visited another nice pub.

From L-R: Windmill, Uncle Bob, moi

That night we chilled with Aunt Jackie for a bit at her bar and introduced her to something uniquely Australian…

Vegemite on Toast, Honey!

… and she liked it!

From L-R: Vodka, Aunt Jacky, Miller Beer, Beer drinking Miller

We loved Chicago and the family we have here and thank everyone heaps for their extremely generous hospitality and all the good times we had. Hopefully we can come back soon or perhaps some of the Chicago mob can come to Perth one day and have someone laugh at your accent for a change!

Rob

PS – might be out of internet range for a few days whilst in Rochester.

PPS – what the hell happened to the Wallabies on Saturday!!! Christ!

Tags: chicago, family

We spent the weekend on a family reunion BBQ marathon.

First up was cousin Amy and her husband Steve’s house where the food was incredible and there were laughs-a-plenty. Aunt Luci printed out name tags for the gaggle of kids that we had to meet – but in the end we actually had everyone’s names down-pat… more or less.

Here are some photos from the day:

The back of Amy and Steve's house

The boys played Bocce - here is a family rated snapshot. Left to Right: Bill, Steve (Amys husband), Rob & Uncle Bob

Left to Right: Aunt Luci, Aunt Jackie, Miranda (Kims daughter)

Amy and Steves daughter Hunter

Left to Right: Tatum, Emma (Heidi and Ians daughters), Aly (Amy and Steves daughter)

Heidi

Amy

Kickboxer Amy gives Rob what he deserves

The next day we were at Gram’s house (Aunt Jackie) for some more laughs and being introduced to a few more members of the family.

One thing we were intrigued about was the promise of being served raw hamburger meat. Yes.. raw hamburger meat. It is a bit of a family tradition to eat it and Aunt Luci assured us it was safe to eat. It is actually called Steak Tartare and is even served in restaurants. We both had some although Rob seemed to like it a bit more than me. In case your wondering, it tasted like raw bread dough. Yummy!

The raw meat delicacy

Mmmmmm no salmonella here Mum!

After making sure we had quick access to a toilet (just in case the hamburger meat didn’t agree with us) we continued on our way and met more members of the family. Here are some more photos of the shenanigans.

Bill The Chef

Kelly

Left to Right: Kelly, Kim, Aunt Luci

After the party, we went out to Amy’s local bar where we got schooled at darts and met some interesting characters. Amy also seemed to know just about everyone in the bar so we were made very welcome.

Meeting the family was great – all really good people and very good to chat to.

Leeane

Tags: chicago, family

It was hard leaving Texas after so long but at least Uncle Bob is coming with us to Chicago for the second round of family reunions. Glancing at the family tree, the Chicago mob outnumber the Australian tree by about 5 to 1 so the catching up with everyone should be quite an experience.

One of the first things I thought as Aunt Luci drove us from the airport is that Chicago must be latin for ‘Endless road work and traffic jams’ and according to Aunt Luci the city has two seasons, Winter and Construction. The next thing we noticed is that the vegetation everywhere is so much more lush than Texas and surprise, surprise Las Vegas. It seems Chicago has no problem with rainfall and it really shows.

The third thing we noticed is that the pizza’s in Chicago are massive and seemingly bottomless. In just two days we’ve attempted to devour four but to no avail.

So far we have caught up with Aunt Luci, Aunt Jackie and the cousins Heidi, Kim and Kelly which has been good fun. Aunt Jackie in particular hasn’t changed a bit since I last saw her 15 years ago, it’s quite incredible really. I’m going to snoop around and see if I can find her fountain of youth a bit later on and hide it in my suitcase.

Pizza aside, we went to the Museum of Science and Industry yesterday which was a hoot. The standout feature has to be the German U-505 submarine. The story behind it is worthy of another blog post but wikipedia has a nice write up for those interested here.

das boot!

One of the really cool things about the sub exhibit is that they have enclosed it in a sub pen which makes it look really authentic. Naturally Uncle Bob stayed in the exhibit most of the afternoon with a huge grin on his face. Unfortunately the sub has largely been gutted to accommodate the large throughput of visitors each day and discourage potential lawsuits from concussed heads on the hefty bulkheads. On top of that they have dramatised the tour by hiring local drama majors to ‘immerse’ you in the life of the German submariner. That’s all well and good for the kiddies, but you can see the adults in the tour just want to be able to check out the gear for themselves rather than take part in a Nazi soapie.

The museum is huge, but alot of it is more tailored towards kids however there is still plenty of cool stuff for us big kids.

die stuka!

spitfire

The space exhibit is kind of cool as well, they have one of the original Apollo re-entry modules on display and a whole bunch of stuff on Mars and the usual photo opportunities.

one small step for a Scot

one giant leap for a dual citizen

big tractor wheel in the farm exhibit

ahoy matey

After the museum Uncle Bob took us on a little family history tour, first stop the American School building in the heart of the Chicago University campus. My great Uncle R.T. Miller built the school American Correspondence School and became a multi-millionaire then in great Miller fashion, gave it away to the people of Chicago. I can’t argue with the nobility of that and in respect the building has been kept in it’s original state, surrounded by modern campus buildings.

American school building

Next stop was Aunt Luci’s original house in South Chicago. From the stories we heard, it sounds like Aunt Luci has some great memories of this place.

Aunt Luci"s old house

More to come soon, we have some bbq’s this weekend so expect more photos.

Rob

Tags: chicago, family