August Vacation - Day 7

The hotel comp'd our room for last night. I bet the bed bug infestation to the USA must be really hard on hotels. That was really nice of them!

Today is the DAY! The day we meet Mary and her daughter Carley! We've arranged to meet at noon at the Cleveland Botanical Gardens. Mary and Carley have a 4.5 hour drive to get there. Cheryl and I are less than an hour away.

We had breakfast at the hotel and had Garmina take us to Cleveland. The Cleveland Botanical Gardens is in a cultural park area. We were able to park at the botanical gardens and walk across the street to the Cleveland Art Museum. As we were enjoying the museum, poor Mary and Carley were stuck in construction traffic. When Mary and Carley were about 15 miles out, Cheryl and I finished at the museum and walked back to the botanical gardens. We tried to get a map of the gardens to look at while we waited, but they wouldn't give us one without a ticket. So we bought our tickets and was in the process of getting a map from the docent, when Mary and Carley walked up! What perfect timing!

Mary is adorable with the cutest mid-west drawl... Carley is adorable, and not at all shy about meeting us! We all hit it off GREAT! It's like we've been friends for years (which we actually have been)!

The gardens were beautiful! These are all Mary's photos. My camera was missing at the time (lost at the bottom of my backpack), DOH! The Rain Forest and the butterfly gardens were great, but it was so hard to get a photo of... Those butterflies are FAST!

It was FUN walking through the gardens. The flowers that Mary knew I didn't know, and the ones that Mary didn't know, I knew...

This is a photo I took of Cheryl as we were travelling through New York. When we were at the botanical gardens, I asked Mary what they were. She said, "We call them weeds..." LOL! Ohio has very pretty weeds!

We parked Mary's car at the hotel and then drove together to.. ARCHIVER'S! (For those who don't know, it's a scrapbook chain superstore which is only on the East coast). You think LA traffic is bad? We were dead stopped on the Interstate. It must have been a really bad accident because they were routing all traffic off the highway. Well, we sure had a nice long time to talk and to get to know each other better!

After shopping and dinner, we went back to the hotel and Mary showed me how to make my mother-in-law's postage stamp afghan! YAHOO! Thank-you, Mary for figuring that out!

Wait until you see what we have planned tomorrow!