A Weekend at Bern. . . Rochester

This is my handsome husband.  He did his hair and got all cute for me for when I came home from spending two weeks with Sarah.  Isn't he adorable!

Weekend In Rochester

Well, it turns out that we live in a beautiful city.  We never knew!

We went on a small adventure this past weekend.  It was decided that we were boring, and we needed to get out and see things, so we decided we would go and look at one of the things on our list.

Rochester has what are called the falls.  Yes, they ARE waterfalls.  Surprise!  There are two of them, named the upper and lower falls.  First on our stop was the upper fall, which was closer to us.  The Genesee River is odd in that it flows from south to north, so the upper fall is actually further south.  My mind had some serious issues coping with a north flowing river - I felt like the world was upside down.

When we arrived at downtown Rochester, we were greeted with an eery silence.  Mostly silence.  The buildings are beautiful, many with roman/greek influence, but downtown goes dead during the weekend when it's chilly out.  There were few, quite literally a few, cars that we encountered on our way once we got into the middle of town.  As we walked about we wondered if we had entered a well developed ghost town, or maybe the apocalypse had happened without anyone telling us.  It was almost a relief to see another couple out sightseeing.  One plus of this oddity was that we got free parking!  Unfortunately, we didn't get any fake money with  it.

Here's a couple of my favorite pictures from the Upper Falls area.  They have a museum (closed) and some nice looking doors.  Melissa has a thing for doors, that I still don't quite understand.  Anyway, here's a couple of pictures:

 You probably can't tell from this picture, or any of the others that I'll put on here, that Melissa has lost some weight, but she has!  She's been doing some pretty awesome exercising, working out often twice a day.  She stubbornly refuses to weigh herself, though, so we don't know how much she's lost.

It turns out I've lost a little too, so we're feeling pretty good about ourselves and our health these days.

This door on the left here goes into the museum.  Pretty door, eh?  And the girl in front of it isn't too bad either.

 So, in this picture you can see the upper falls.  It's really pretty, in case you can't tell.  They also use the falls as a hydroelectric dam as well.  Good for them for using stuff and such, though we were a little sad that the area was as developed as it was.

 This is a door to a bar.  I'm showing my true colors!

Even when you're not looking at the falls, the colors here are starting to be pretty impressive.  It's kind of hard to see because we do not have the most awesome cameras in the world, but lots of the trees are turning this really beautiful deep red color.  There's a multitude of bright vibrant oranges and yellows as well, and an occasional lighter red color.  I actually was disappointed until what Melissa tells me was a tree with faded, light red color, but I'm going to call it pink.  I wanted a pink tree, I saw one, so I'm satisfied.  The colors here are gorgeous, though, and I'm pretty sure Lacey would be going out of her mind right now with all of the picture opportunities.

We also went to the so called "Lower Falls."  They are a lot less developed, but Miss and I have agreed that they are also much prettier.  Take a gander,

This is from a bridge that cars travel on that's above the falls.  you can't see it well, but this is a gorge, which means there are not really any easy ways to get next to the falls.  There is some sort of rock mining or soot collecting building next to the falls (a tragedy, we think) that has a road to it, but you're still limited.  To really get close you have to hike down.  We didn't.  Not this time, anyway.

More Lower Falls pictures!

Don't I have a pretty wife?

This last picture here is from down close to the falls looking at the bridge above the fall.  They have some really pretty photo opportunities here.

We also went to a graveyard!  Turns out our neighbors are all really quiet folk.

 

Sorry about the quality of the pictures from here on out.  My camera is still an enigma to me.  You can't really tell from this picture, but this little house of the dead is built into the side of a hill.  They had a lot of those, and a lot of non-hilly houses of the dead in this graveyard.  It was huge.  Really huge.  And some famous people live here.  For example, it turns out that one of our neighbors is Susan B. Anthony.

I'm ashamed to admit we didn't know who she was when we met her here, but we found out later on wikipedia.  Fredrick Douglas is also buried in this same cemetery, but we were worried our Sunday dinner would be burning (graveyard was a Sunday experience) so we left off meeting him for another day.

Here's some more graveyard pictures:  (this is Melissa, the pictures with awesome color were taken with my camera and edited by me, just so you know) ;-)

Which pretty much sums up our weekend.  We're starting to really get into the swing of things here, and really enjoying ourselves.  We're planning on going to a state park this weekend, which is supposed to be "The thing to do" and "the place to go" here in Rochester, so we're pretty excited about that.

Just for fun, here's a picture of where we're living, from the outside.  You can't tell, but we live in a U bend.  And we're in the bottom part of that U.  It actually is really quiet here, as most of the graduate students spend all of their time at school.  Or at least that's what it seems like.

And there's us, for the moment at least.