Travel in New York

Recently Russ and I have been doing a considerable amount of traveling. Over mostly the months of June and July we covered nearly 14,000 miles, only 1650 of which were in an airplane. At the end of July we were driving along Seneca Lake in New York State, totally disobeying the GPS which wanted us to head way out of our way just so we could drive on a more major road. We are so glad we chose the road we took! It took us through several small towns with little businesses like "Vince and Ed's Auto Shop", an ice cream stand in every town, a hot dog stand advertising a daily special of "Garbage Plate $6". There were dozens of wineries, fields of grape vines, GREEN everywhere! There were roads like "Lower Farm Road" and "Upper Mountain Road" as we continued driving south along the Susquehanna River and through the Appalachian Mountains.
 We made a stop for lunch in a little town at a local Oriental restaurant that offered a pretty small buffet but the food was prepared not knowing if they would have 2 or 12 or no patrons. As we walked in the door, a young Chinese girl in her early teens immediately got up from a table and came to greet us and sit us at a table. A woman, I'm guessing her mother, came out from the kitchen and spoke to her rapidly in Chinese and smiled at us. After pointing us to the plates for the buffet, the girl sat back down at her table with a younger boy, I'm guessing her brother. There were only 3 other customers in the place. One of them looked over at the boy's book and asked what he was reading. He apparently was very interested in archeology. The boy and girl spoke unaccented English but the mother spoke very little English. When I went in the ladies' rest room, the walls were decorated with pictures carefully drawn by children of dragons and flowers. When we were nearly done eating, a couple of people came in to look over the buffet and said they were checking it out before bringing in the rest of their group. They said they would be right back before stepping out the door and, sure enough, in just a few minutes a group of about 10 people of varying ages came tumbling in headed for the sparsely filled dishes in the buffet. The Chinese lady tried in her broken English to explain that more food was being prepared in the kitchen and would be out shortly. Russ and I both spoke up to tell them the food was good, hoping they wouldn't leave again. We were relieved when they opted to stay. America is really a wonderful place where an immigrant family with very little more than the willingness to work can manage to provide for their family. I hope no health dept. official ever goes in there and gives them a hard time for having the "children" participating in the family business. I'm sure that when school is in session, both of them attend. They will probably both some day earn more money than their parents ever will and they'll have great careers.
Russ and I enjoyed the beauty of the land and the feel of small-town America. We would return to live in New York State if it weren't for the moral and political atmosphere there. There are lots of good people there but there are also a lot of people who are either silent or in agreement with having "Big Brother" government that interfere with everyday life a little too much and "tolerance" in the form of accepting alternative philosophies to the extent that people with traditional moral standards on religion, sexual relations, marriage, family, chastity, and dressing modestly are considered prejudiced. I guess the tolerance only includes what some might call deviance. It spoils the beauty that would otherwise be there, kind of like a beautiful tree that's rotten in the core.