The Fourth of July at Keuka Lake

As previously mentioned, we spent this past weekend at Alicia's family's lake house on Keuka Lake in western New York. As usual, the weather was gorgeous and we had a blast.

The highlight of the weekend was a big "jorts" (aka jean shorts) party and meat-in-a-casing cookoff (for which Cooper and I were judges), and I'll write about all of that later this week. Until then, though, here are a few pictures of the trip:

Our little gang, hanging out on the end of the dock. What you can't see, unfortunately, is that Dixon and Maggie are wearing matching fourth of July outfits.

Cooper, Bill, Kyle, Mary, Dixon and I in front of the RV, just before our six hour ride home - with no air conditioning. It wasn't exactly cold in there.

Cooper and his co-pilot. Dixon has to sit in the front of the RV since there are no seatbelts for his booster in the back.

Kyle caught the first fish of the trip, but only after Mary baited his hook for him.

Unfortunately for Bill, he and Kyle had made a bet about who would catch the first fish. Loser had to jump in the water wearing his jorts. Bill really stepped it up - he's mid-flip in this shot.

At the lake, nobody goes hungry. Both Alicia and Mike's parents spend a hilarious amount of time cooking - and they were both there. This is breakfast on Saturday morning - eggs, bacon, sausage, potatoes, toast and English muffins with homemade jelly, waffles, and lake trout.

And this is breakfast on our last morning - we closed out our "meat in a casing" weekend with hot dog bun French toast, a Mrs. Kelly creation. She decided to make it just because the buns were there, and had low expectations, but it was really good. As it turns out, hot dog buns are the perfect size and consistency for a delicious French toast.

Breakfast is one of the bigger meals at the lake and we sometimes skip lunch. But we don't skip snacks...which is why we ended up with about 50 bags of chips. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the vat of queso dip Alicia and Mike made (with help from Mrs. Barger). It was enough for about 30 or 40 people. At that point, I think there were ten people at the house.

Mrs. Kelly and Mrs. Barger are dessert-making machines in the kitchen. While we were there, they made two types of cupcakes, frosted brownies, and pretzel salad, all from scratch. The cupcakes above were a super successful experiment - pineapple upside down cupcakes. They were delicious.

Later this week: meat in a casing gets thrown down by the extended Kelly family. And I eat it all.