Up in Vermont

After a great visit with daughter Lynn and family in Kent, Connecticut, where our son in law, John, did yeoman work helping with the fix of our emergency brake system, we headed north to Vermont.

Our first afternoon in Vermont, we were under a tornado watch. The sky turned black at 5:30 in the afternoon and hail the size of Kennedy half-dollars banged on the roof of our rig. It was so loud we could barely talk.

This all passed in half an hour and the sun popped back out. Very strange feeling. But the torrential rains returned later in the evening and we had horrendous lightning through the night.

We have already set to work, doing fixes on furniture at daughter Stephanie's home. Jo is baking banana bread. Stephanie and our two grandchildren head for Italy in eight weeks to join son in law Alex in Trento, up in the Dolomite Mountains of northern Italy.

Jo came down with what turned out to be shingles and we found an urgent care place in Colchester, VT, that treated her after the Memorial Day holiday. This painful immune-system illness has resulted in blisters that feel like tiny needles pricking her abdomen. Happily, there now is a drug for the treatment of shingles and she is on a week-long regimen of this. So we expect great things soon!