I am sorting out some feeling that caught me by surprise during services. Carol and I have sat in the same pew area of the same synagogue for so many years we cannot remember ever sitting anywhere else. As we sat in an adjacent pew because of the set up for streaming the mixed media service, I contemplated the empty pew. I thought back to the days of sitting there with our boys, my parents and Carol’s and aunts and uncles and friends and acquaintances. some of whom we only ever socialized with during the holidays. Saving seats was an endless topic of conversation, at one time we claimed an entire pew. The entire section of pews was empty. The people who belonged there were not present. I know that many were staying home and attending the streamed service on Youtube.  Still I missed their presence.

Our children and their children are not in Rochester and their mode of worship is different from ours. There is no right or wrong, just different so that even if they were nearby they probably would not choose to sit in these pews.

So many others are no longer with us. I open my email with a kind of dread each day as I watch for postings from Brighton Memorial Chapel with yet another loss. As I contemplated this thought; Rabbi Stein talked about witnessing life from two sides. We pray “thank G-d for bringing us to this wonderful day” and we pray “thank G-d for our having survived an illness/accident/dangerous travel” My Jewish readers will recognize these as shehecheyanu and birkat hagomel. We seem to spend life suspended between these two points. 

All of this thought brought me to tears I have not experienced in some time. I really really miss those who are gone. I miss the presence of those still with us who for good reason chose not to be physically present. I miss the physicality of the community that has been our home for more than 70 years. 

I need to thank the Rabbis, Peter Stein and Rochelle Tulik for using their sermons to bring new understanding of where we are today and where I am as well. I know that they devote much thought to these words. They need to know that they reached at least one member of the congregation. 

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.

The last leg of the journey was from Chautauqua KOA (East side of the lake) to Victor NY. The plan was to take US 20. I forgot that when we did this in 2011 I said I would never drive that stretch of US 20 through the Buffalo area again. The day started out with the usual nonsense, the road we planned to take was closed for construction. I just can’t wait for the Infrastructure Bill to pass. Since Wyoming we have been running through road construction daily. In WY and NE our Garmin insisted on rerouting us because the “Road is Closed” actually lanes were closed but the route was open, sort of, single lane often with oncoming traffic to our left. In OH the detours on US 6 had us covering half of northern Ohio and Pennsylvania to get to Napoleon PA for fuel. 

The stretch from Chautauqua was particularly frustrating since we encountered weight limits of 6 tons on several routes we intended to take – our rear axle is 20,000 pounds! I was not about to take any chances so we continued on the only route with no posted weight limit until we found our way to US 20. Eventually we back tracked about 6 miles to get on I 90 and make tracks to Victor to store the coach. I still much prefer back roads to Interstates, but when I just want to get someplace already the Interstates do work, unless they are under construction with lanes closed.

Our next road trip will be in the Jeep Grand Cherokee to the Adirondacks where we will stay at the Saranac Hotel for four nights. We will see our friends from Sacramento, meet their daughter and family and visit some sights we haven’t seen in several years. In the mean time we are very busy in Rochester with dinner with Rohma and Josh and plans with friends being shaped as I write. 

I will be stopping by to “visit” Geewhiz from time to time just to be sure everything is in order. For now travel will be more limited than usual.

We are doing it again, driving cross country to southern California, only we are 8 months into the pandemic and trying to get away from Rochester winter. In the past we said good by to friends and family, “we’ll see you next summer.” The big difference is we will see many of them as regularly as we have while in Rochester and on the same glassy screen as all our interactions have been. 

Over the years as we would arrive in a town we would call the people we knew there to say hi or plan  a get together. Somehow we seldom called from across the country if it wasn’t family or really close friends.  Today we are checking in with Rochester people even though we will be no further away even if 3,000 miles intervene.  Times are indeed strange, will we ever resume relaxed actual gatherings? Is the Escapee hug a thing of the past? Even family hugs are limited and based on sharing a bubble. I attended a funeral in NJ. Interesting, if not for the live feed I doubt we would have driven to NJ for the father of a friend. Our nephew, the rabbi, is doing funerals and Bar Mitzvahs on zoom and in small group and socially distanced events. Shiva is a zoom gathering and the Bar Mitzvah party is too. 

Our initial plan is to pick up the coach in Niagara Falls on Wednesday and return to Rochester where we will finish loading the food for departure on Thursday. The plan is to arrive in Charlottesville on Friday and depart on Monday for a two day drive to Red Bay Alabama. I hope to have some minor cabinetry work done and leave by Dec 1. That departure will be set by the availability of the woodworker. The work shouldn’t take more than an hour since he has the tools and worked on building these coaches.

This feels like planning a Jazz Fest evening of concerts. We have a plan and will be able to report on what actually takes place, after the fact. Last year our run down the Natchez Trace Parkway got short circuited by what turned out to be minor failure. This year we will try it again.

We have been wandering around our apartment since October 8 with very little non virtual exposure to the outside world beyond trips to the grocery store, pharmacy and doctors. We had one great visit with grandson Josh and Rohma in Highland Park near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It was 80 degrees and we had a picnic on the lawn.

After that it was back to routine until October 31 (yesterday). It was crisp and clear and there was still some color to be seen. We couldn’t make up our mind where to go but both of us wanted the wheels to roll even if it was only in the Jeep. As we left the parking lot I decided to go north. Eventually making our way to Lake Avenue (sorry for many of you the route description will be meaningless, use this map if you want to follow along). Eventually we saw a sign for Boxart Street which leads to the Genesee River at Turning Point Park. This is a bluff above a wide spot in the river where small southbound freighters, mostly carrying cement, must turn since the falls prevent further navigation. The parking lot was overflowing so we backed out and continued north on Lake Avenue until the lake got in our way. 

We pulled into the large Charlotte Beach parking lot and pulled up to the river’s edge and found easy parking. Although it was not quite 50 degrees and there was a breeze, we agreed we needed to walk out on the pier, a walk we have done throughout our lives.

This pier, west of the river, has been rebuilt so many times in our lives it is hard to remember, winter often wreaks havoc with ice and storms. There used to be a large lighthouse at the end, now there is an automated light. The east pier is being reconstructed this year.

Having reached the lake, west of the river, it seemed logical to continue west. First we drove Beach Avenue lined with lovely homes facing the lake well above the water. Eventually we found ourselves along Edgemere Drive lined with smaller homes that are threatened with high water every ten years or so. I won’t go into the battle between those homeowners and the international organization that monitors and controls lake levels. This road peters out and we joined the Lake Ontario State Parkway, thank you Robert Moses, still heading west. We stopped briefly at Braddock Bay Park where there is no action at the Hawk Counting Platform – wrong season – and the rest of the park was quite empty. We continued on to Hamlin Beach State Park, also pretty much closed although we were able to enter the park and drive around. The camping area is closed and gated so we couldn’t explore. 

We turned East now. retracing on the Parkway all the way to Lake Avenue where we continued East on to the Colonel Patrick O’Rouke Memorial Bridge over the river (he was a local hero at Little Round Top in Gettysburg also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_O%27Rorke#Civil_War) this brought us into Durand Eastman Park still along the lake. It was time and we turned south on Sea Breese Parkway which feeds into 590 (not an Interstate here). A quick stop at Wegman’s for essentials – ice cream – and we headed home after a satisfying 2 1/2 drive. 

We were reminded how wonderful it is to wander with no destination and no timeframe. We look forward to getting back on the road in GeeWhiz sometime soon.