Well…A Break Is One Thing

Every once in a while someone says they’re taking a break from blogging and disappears for a while.  I disappeared with no notice in March.  My first year of retirement was full.  I did a lot of gardening, traveled for the first time in more than two years, and found out what it’s like to make my own schedule.  I’ve got a lot of news stored up but will start with the most recent, a visit to my friend Leanne, who lives in a little town south of Lake George.  What an amazingly gorgeous place.  And because it was so gorgeous and thoughts of moving there kept popping into my head, I’m going to tell about the whole trip…

First Glimpse of Lake George…

Leanne loves hiking, kayaking, the mountains, camping and in general the great outdoors, so are we a good match or what?  I drove up and could see the change in fall color as I went north.  It was at peak in the Adirondacks.  Leanne had bought a house but hadn’t closed on it yet, so we walked over to see it and walked around the town, which has a pretty downtown full of small local businesses and also has a nice arts community.  That allowed me to recover from the drive.  While there, we went to the Shirt Factory, which houses area artists, and then drove up to Lake George, where Leanne’s family has a lake house.  

View from house down to lake.

The next day, we headed to the town of Ticonderoga up on Lake Champlain and had lunch in a little park there on the La Chute River.  

After that we went to see Fort Ticonderoga.  The fort was built by the French in the 1750s and changed hands numerous times.  By the 1940s, not much of it was left and as with many historic sites, a group of people saved what remained, did some archeology and research, and set about reconstructing it.  Today it has some really well informed interns dressed as colonials, a lot of different kinds of cannon, and some commanding views of Lake Champlain.

At that point we were close to the Lake Champlain bridge and Leanne drove across it into Vermont, where we parked and walked back across into New York, looking at the lake and the turning trees and geese flying south.  

This is a beautiful bridge. You used to have to take a ferry across the lake.

It was the evening before the full Hunter’s Moon and we took advantage of its brightness to climb up to the parapet of a lighthouse memorial where the view was also spectacular.

What a gorgeous evening!

The next day, we planned to go to a place called Jabe Pond to kayak.  It’s only a ten minute drive from the lake house, but pretty much needs a four wheel drive for access when the road is open.  Leanne’s friend Tom came with a flatbed truck to strap three kayaks to and drove us up.  I could write a whole blog on this place.

First, I wondered who calls 160+ acres of water a pond?  I guess if Lake George and Lake Champlain are the reference, it would be considered small.  But I did a little research and learned that ponds are considered bodies of standing water, shallow enough that sunlight can reach the bottom.  Lakes are deeper and have zones the sunlight never reaches.  They also have more inflow and outflow of water and more varied temperatures.  In spite of the fifty-something degree air temperatures on Jabe Pond, when I dipped my hand into the water, it felt around seventy.  I imagine with a rock bottom warmed over the summer it holds warmth for a while.

What a day with all that sparkle!

There are camp sites around the pond and little islands.  One of them had the remains of a large hearth on it and we landed there and ate our packed lunch with a thermos of tea.

The pond had loons on it and what I think were lesser scaups.  These look like ducks, but are smaller.  I can’t be sure because I couldn’t see them that well.  A nice thing about this trip was seeing and hearing the loons.  They have a variety of calls, ranging from screams to hound-like bays, to trills, all with different purposes and all of them haunting.  Seeing them is always magical to me.  Leanne and I heard one of the trills our first night at Lake George.

The neighbors and a few people in town had told us that the Gore Mountain ski area had a craft fair going on and was giving gondola rides up to the ski summit.  The foliage was supposed to be spectacular and we figured viewing it from a height would be good.  I’d never been in a ski gondola and the only skiing I’ve ever done is cross country.  It was an experience to imagine the inclines with snow on them and skiers hurtling down.

On the way back from the craft fair, we stopped a couple places, once for a view and once to walk down to the Hudson, which like the Mississippi, is a different river in its northern reaches.  The Hudson here is a mix of swift current and still pools, with a rock bottom.  Tom and Leanne swim here in the summer and I can see its appeal—clear water, rocks to swim to, mild current.  Every time I glimpsed the Hudson up here, I thought how lovely it was and how fun it could be to kayak.

Our final trips before heading back to our regular lives included a visit to the Adirondack Experience Museum and a trip up Mt. Defiance.  The Adirondack Experience Museum was interesting for its collection of historic structures and buildings displayed around the grounds.  There was a one-room school with McGuffey Readers; a hunting lodge; a lean-to with plans for how to build one; a summer sleeping house with intricate outside decorations; an artist’s cabin; and a log hotel.  They also had two trains: one that people who owned their own train cars rode in and one that transported people up to resorts.  I did not take pictures there because the documentation was fabulous and we were absorbed in reading and looking (I guess that’s the experience part).

The museum grounds overlooked Blue Mountain Lake, yet another beauty spot…

The museum was closing for the season the day we went, so one of the things I was interested in was not available.  They have Adirondack guide boats you can row on a pond in warmer weather, but they also had a model inside that you could climb into that simulated the rowing experience.  Leanne and I both tried it out.  The nice thing about these is that you can go out in them with someone else and face each other, as opposed to kayaks and canoes.  They were designed to be light for portages, skim the top of the water and yet be able to hold three people, cargo, and oh, say, a dead deer and some bear pelts.  I imagine with all that cargo they’d be a little lower in the water, but apparently they remain stable.

Before heading back, we went to Mt. Defiance, the lookout point above Fort Ticonderoga (the last picture in the Ft. Ticonderoga gallery shows it) and the reason the Continental Army had to abandon the fort at one point (but they took cannon with them to free Boston, so it wasn’t a total loss).  We had tried a couple times to go up to the lookout, but we kept getting there after the gate was locked.  This time we went early and there was a bus of tourists having lunch in the pavilion at the top.  That didn’t deter us, though we did consider passing ourselves off as tour members and having a snack.

This is looking southeast across Lake Champlain into Vermont.

Views of Lake Champlain and Fort Ticonderoga were amazing from here.  We could see Vermont’s Green Mountains across the lake and it turns out they’re another hiking destination for locals.  Maybe skiing, too, for all I know.

You can see Ft. Ticonderoga below us to the left of my head. What views, huh?

So, this exceedingly long blog is just a small update.  I’ll write soon on other things, including the garden, our donations, and the new cold frame!  Apologies to everyone for dropping off the face of the earth.  I’ll be around to visit your blogs and catch up soon!

And because I can’t resist…the fall garden with the new cold frame!