Family vacationing

There's nothing better than a family vacation to convince yourself (confirm?) that you live with a pack of loonies. I love my family dearly, but I am by nature kind of detached. It's something I work to overcome in order to have close personal relationships. But I like that the detachment is still there, because it allows me to both adore my wife and kids and still sit back and think, "Wow, these people are weird." I've always done that, when I was growing up and we all went somewhere, even when I spent extended time with friends later in life. It's like the way words start to sound weird if you repeat them often enough.

Today I dropped my older daughter at the train station. A lot of her friends are leaving for college, and I think she's pretty well had it with all of us, which is pretty natural for an 18 year-old. Last time we left her, she had a party and had 8 or 9 people sleep over. This was against my expressed wishes, but she was so open and responsible about it, and did such a good job cleaning up (and didn't drink any of my beer, though apparently someone else's beer was consumed) that we didn't get mad. The only thing she did that upset us was that she let people sleep in out bed without asking permission. Is that unreasonable on our part? I'd never let anyone sleep in her bed without asking her first. In any event, she said she specifically made sure that she had people who we know well sleep in our bed. That's better? I guess.

Today we went to what they call the sliding track a bit outside of Lake Placid. It's the premier track for bobsled, luge and skeleton in the US, by some measure in the world. We were given a tour by a cranky old guy who was knowledgeable and glad that it was just the 3 of us and not a huge group. He took us to various points of interest on the way to the top, where he left us at the track to walk down to the bottom. In case you watch this kind of thing on TV and wonder how they get going so fast, you get no conception on TV of how steep the track is. It drops 500 feet in a mile, and some of the sections are relatively flat, so the others have to be 12-15% grade. That is seriously steep and you cover it with ice and put a half ton of riders and sled on it and it's amazing that they can even control it. The guide said nobody's ever flown off this track in 10 years, though. It was fun to walk down.