That's true more than ever when you leave home and settle into your own life. Canandaigua is a great place to grow up. It's an even better place to be an adult and watch your children grow up.
And... we have a great neighborhood. We have neighbors who are our friends, and who are a part of our lives and the lives of our children.
Oh, and best of all, we have wine!
No more introspective crap about living in an pastoral setting in upstate NY. The rest of the post will be devoted to wine, and the wonderous festival only 3 years old that we call the Riesling Festival.
This entire booze-fest was a scheme created by the brilliant minds at Dixon-Schwable Advertising as a fundraiser for the YMCA. And it brings in, oh, about $70,000 a year for the Y. Not bad for a 2-day fest, huh?
It sure would be nice if they shared the wealth. With, you know, other local charities. Ahem, Red Cross? But, whatever. I understand it's for the Y. And I'm not going to complain too much. Because I like the Riesling Festival. 
I take that back. I LOVE it. There are 15 vendors sampling the best white wine NY has to offer. And if you go on a Sunday (which we have the last two years), it's raining and there are no crowds.
No crowds = a lot of wine. 
Enough to make new friendships easy to come by. This guy is the manager of Pizzaria Uno in Victor. 
And this guy from Zugibe Winery. He's smiling because he just made his month's worth of sales off me. 
I tend to be a pretty good customer after 3 hours of wine tasting.
As I was going through my pictures of the day I thought these were pretty interesting. On the surface they're just funny. This is Kim walking through the deserted field between what was the trailer park and what was Polemini's restaurant.
She bravely volunteered to check out the strange animal Julie saw going into the now-closed eatery. And came back screaming about a freak gray squirrel-gopher-monster.
But more than a funny picture, it's a photo that captures what has become of one of the nicest places to eat in Canandaigua. Purchased by a developer several years ago, it and the trailer park were shut down to make way for a fancy new condo-retail-hotel complex. It hasn't materialized yet. Instead the still-could-be-operating breakfast favorite is deteriorating along the most expensive lakefront property in the country (and no, I am not exaggerating).
Look at the size of that hole near the roof!
Funny thing about this picture... if the development does ever get legs, this will be one of those pictures we look back on and say "remember when?"
Remember when we parked in what used to be that old, run-down trailer park? Right across from Kershaw... which used to be surrounded by a chain link fence, but at least there were multiple beaches you could swim in within the park?
And there was the fun icecream place with the angled roof... back before the upscale development took over the lakeshore.
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