We had some out-of-town guests this weekend who gave us the opportunity to visit Rochester’s greatest hits and see some new things around town. Meeghan and Sean were kind enough to come all the way out from Boston to hang out for the weekend, and we made the requisite stops (Wegman’s, GEH, and so forth) as well as some new destinations, including Sticky Lips for some delicious bbq and the Strong Museum for an afternoon of fun and nostalgia.
The weather was appropriately all over the place, from sunny and 60? on Friday to snowy and 9? this morning, but that’s Rochester for you. The Strong Museum was a great experience, with the great Sesame Street exhibition, the cool mini-Wegmans where kids could scan their own groceries, and the excellent Toy Hall of Fame upstairs. The exhibitions kept going and going, many of which didn’t seem to have anything to do with kids or toys or anything: porcelain, teapots, china, the Rochester Business Hall of Fame… I had thought it was a totally kid-related museum, but that wasn’t the case. It’s always fun to see toys you owned now sitting behind glass in a museum.
Never ones to learn a lesson, we gave trivia night at the Old Toad another shot. Needless to say, the results were disappointing, though the experience was a lot of fun. We mustered only six correct answers out of twenty questions (one of which was thanks to our Formula 1-fan neighbors), but that wasn’t the point, I hope.
A funny thing happened in the first round of the quiz, though, one of the weirdest things that’s happened in awhile. Sean and I were chatting beforehand about questions I’d had before, and we got to talking about the fifty states. Sean said, “Maine comes up a lot, because it’s the only state with a monosyllabic name, and the only state that borders only one other state.” Hmm, I thought, that’s interesting. I’ll file that away. Flash forward to the first ‘beer question’ of the evening, at which point anyone who knows the answer to a given question is supposed to shout out the answer first in order to win a beer. Well, the quizmaster announced the first questions, and it was “What is the only state with a monosyllabic name?” We were both torn between expressing our amazement to one another and shouting out the answer; needless to say, we got it out in time, and Sean had his well-deserved beer. Weird, weird, weird.
