In more ways than one, we are back. 

I won’t bore you all with the nonsense caused by hackers unknown who found goldberg-online to be a useful tool to go phishing. Our son Dan has put in too many hours cleaning up the mess they left behind. There is still much left to do since most of the links to really old fun stuff on goldberg-online and Carols art on cgstudio.net are still dead. Also we need to find a way to prevent this in the future.

I left this blog with plans to go to Saranac Lake in the Adirondack Mountain State Park (ADK). We went!

There are a multitude of routes we have taken to the ADKs over the years. I decided to travel out NY 104 to NY 3 which is essentially the entire route unless we decided to explore some side roads and explore we did. I saw a turn for Old Ridge Road (formerly 104) and took that, it shortened the route by a couple of miles and added 10 minutes. Further on we diverted to 104A up closer to Lake Ontario just to see it. I had to arm wrestle the car GPS to stay on 3 all the way to Watertown rather than jump on I81. The route ended up looking like this. 

We stayed at the Hotel Saranac which used to be a training hotel for Paul Smith’s College. Now it is a Hilton Curio collection. The building appears unchanged from the late 70’s when we stayed there while visiting the boys at Adirondack Swim and Trip Camp. The interior is updated to the extent possible and the accommodations were fine. We had dinner in the Campfire Restaurant the first night after drinks in the 2nd floor lounge – it is the entire 2nd floor, well the front half anyhow. 

On Thursday we went on a nostalgia drive. In no particular order; Camp Cherokee on Gilpin Bay where I spent many summers as a camper and a waiter; Adirondack Swim and Trip where the boys spent many of their summers; of course a stop at Donnellys Creamery, known to ASTC family as “Snake Pit” and a long drive down through Long Lake and Racket Lake Village and out the long dirt road to Great Camp Sagamore, the Vanderbilt Camp where I spent six weeks “improving” my reading. Dinner was back in Saranac Lake Village at Fiddlehead Grill where we had a delightful dinner and a bit of a story to get a table.

Friday Anna Lee and Jerry, friends from RVing although they have hung up their keys,  joined us and we met at Adirondack Experience (we knew it as The Adirondack Museum on Blue Mountain Lake). Their daughter is Director of Interpretation which is what drew all of us to the ADKX at the ADKs. They had to drag me kicking and screaming out of the boat collection. It seems that happened the last time we were there, probably 30 years ago. If you find yourself in that part of NY somewhere north of Albany take an extra hour or two drive and plan to spend most of a day at the museum. The cafe food was good too.

Saturday we took a very old time boat tour of Lake Placid. I remember that tour from 65 years ago when I was a camper, we spent the open time hanging around on Lake Placid Main St another activity I remember vaguely from 65 years ago. We were hot and tired by late afternoon and found the library where we sat in the comfortable chairs in the AC and continued talking, petting books and eventually drawing the librarian into a discussion of books about books. 

That night we had a quick dinner with their family at home and drove out to Six Nations Cultural Center in Onchiota, just past ASTC. There is a campground in that town that we camped in once. We were there for a couple of hours of Story Telling by Native Americans. Sunday morning after breakfast at the home of Anna Lee and Gerry’s daughter and son in law, we were back in the car for the 5 hour drive to Rochester which we did in  a straight shot on 3 and 104 with a stop at a wonderful farm market on the eastern edge of Oswego. All we needed was some milk. . . 

On the way we texted Josh about dinner so we bought 5 ears of nice fresh corn to go with a wonderful udon noodle dish Carol prepared. 

Since that day we have been doing pretty much the usual; thinking about travel to Canada and Rosh Hashanah  coming up next week.