Adirondack Museum bonus: boats, boats, and more boats!

As we drove around the Adirondacks earlier this month, I probably saw more cars with boats of various kinds atop them than I'd ever seen anywhere. Even around here, where we have lots of nice rivers. Up there, though, they have rivers and lakes and ponds, lots of them. To refresh your memory...

...these statistics refer to the Adirondack Park that is pretty much contiguous with the whole mountain range. 

So boating of many kinds has always been a major activity in this area. To celebrate this great tradition, the Adirondack Museum had a whole building devoted to boats and boating, and it was the highlight of our visit there for me.

From this lovely sailboat that's suspended in the Museum's entrance building...

...to an impressive array of guideboats that are the signature craft of the area. We learned a lot about these interesting vessels, even getting to watch a boat builder working on a new one:

The craftsmanship in all of the boats on display was exquisite. Here's a closeup of a guideboat interior...doesn't this wood look luscious?!

Here are a couple more examples of guideboats:

a splendid wooden guideboat

a more primitive example (note the photo on the wall in the background)

As ubiquitous as these boats must be in Adirondack boating history, at least one of the quotes on display in the exhibit might be considered fighting words to our paddling friends:

(I highlighted another interesting set of quotes in this Wordless Wednesday post a few weeks back.)

Other types of watercraft were also on display, even some that were motorized:

Other boat-related artifacts were om the exhibit, too, like this handsome "cruising" trophy. I loved the little silver canoe that apparently came with it:

But my favorite item wasn't even in the boat exhibit building but in with the sleds and carriages. It's a "boat carrying wagon," typical of "about 1890," according to the museum information. The wagon frame is original but the boat rack was "carefully reproduced."

I think we should invest in one of these to carry our boats to the river in style!

Adirondack history: part 1

Upstate New York isn't just rich in scenery. Lots of important history happened up here, too. And besides, just ordinary life in the area has been pretty interesting through the years as well.

One of the best places to learn about this everyday life history is the Adirondack Museum, near Blue Mountain Lake.

I showed you this museum's scenic setting in my last post, so now it's time to explore some of its history exhibits.

The place is set up in a series of buildings, similar, but not nearly as large, as the wonderful Shelburne Museum just outside of Burlington, VT. Some of the structures are original cabins and other buildings from the area, and some are more recent exhibit spaces. 

Here's the interior of a rather luxurious cabin. Note the wooden designs in the furniture, simultaneously elaborate and simple. 

A similar style of decoration fully adorns the outside of this building, which was being worked on:

Logging has always been an important industry in the area, and there was a whole building devoted to interesting exhibits about this often dangerous activity. Here's a large photo of some guys working to break up a log jam from the "Jam Boat." I can't help remembering this wrenching scene from Sometimes a Great Notion whenever I see logs in the water. 

The wetlands up here are used for recreation, too, of course. Here's a reconstructed "Fish Camp," cozy and very well-appointed...perhaps "glamping" isn't such a new idea?

The museum's exhibits were heavily weighted toward transportation, and I'm saving one particular mode of transport for a whole other post. But for now, some selected Adirondack ways of getting from point A to point B:

funerals still have to happen, even when roads are frozen...

out and about in style

My favorite transportation exhibit was a wonderful Gilded Age train car.  I so wish it was still possible to travel like this!

looking down the corridor

such elegant accommodations!

attention to every Victorian detail

Next up, I'll show you some more expert craftsmanship...making ways to get around works of art.

Adirondack scenery

In my last post, where I described the highlight and main impetus for our trip east, I said that Cooperstown, New York, is in the middle of nowhere. Which is sort of true, in terms of urban areas.

But there's plenty of neat stuff nearby: scenery, history, and charming small towns. So I'll tell you about the brief glimpses we had of these various attractions now and in upcoming posts.

The Adirondacks are very different kinds of mountains than the Rockies, with which we are much more familiar. But they are scenic in their own way, with the added advantage of not being so danged high, making hiking around on them a lot easier for flatlanders.

The photo above was taken at a scenic pull-out somewhere between Speculator (who came up with

that name for a really nice little town?!) and Saranac Lake. I think the high points on the horizon are Bullhead and Puffer Mountains.

The road we took from the Albany area to Saranac Lake, which was to be our Adirondack base of operations for 3 days, followed the Sacandaga River for a while. We stopped at a picnic pullout along the road and I took the picture on the right. It shows the river through some of the dense forest that is a defining attribute of this area.

We took time during our drive to spend a very pleasant few hours at the Adirondack Museum. I'll tell you lots more about its fascinating exhibits when I get to my history blog posts, but its scenic setting was a standout, too. It's near Blue Mountain Lake, and you get good views of this photogenic and typically island-studded lake from the Museum's cafe, where we had a nice lunch:

The next day, fortified by a hearty and delicious dinner at Nonna Fina's in Saranac Lake the night before, we tackled our first real hike. Touted in the guidebooks and by the cheerful staff at the visitor center as a "family-friendly" trail, we struck out to climb Mt. Baker. It's right in town, the roundtrip isn't even 2 miles and the elevation at the top isn't even 2500 feet. How hard could it be?

Well, our final assessment was that Adirondack families must be pretty tough! Not only was it very rocky (see the photo at the left), which wasn't too much of a concern, except when the rocks were slippery when covered by wet leaves. But it was really, really steep!

Joan remarked that in Colorado they would have made the trail with a lot more switchbacks. Apparently, though, switchbacks are a new-fangled western invention.

However, the view from the top (or almost the top; except for Joan, who of course was 'way ahead of Steve and myself, we decided to blow off the final yardage) was pretty nice and going down wasn't quite as scary as I'd thought it would be.

A local we met at our stopping and lunching spot said she thought we were looking at Lower Saranac Lake, which is the closest one to town. That's it in the distance in the photo below. The mid-range lake is Lake Flower, which was right at the doorstep of our old-school motel. The bit of water that's closest is the "pond" at the foot of the climb. I knew that rivers were lots bigger in the east than in our neck of the woods, but apparently lakes are, too. This "pond" would be a good-sized lake in south Texas.

Badly in need of more sustenance after this short but strenuous outing, we found it at the Blue Moon Cafe in downtown Saranac Lake (more about this charming little town in a future post). Fortunately I was now able to continue on to another excursion. 

A bit northwest of Saranac Lake is the Paul Smith College Visitor Interpretive Center (the VIC, to those in the know) and it sounded intriguing. As it turned out, we were fortunate that some sort of special program was in progress, since that meant the nature center was open later than usual and it was getting on toward dusk. 

So we had time for a brief but fulfilling walk on a couple of their nature trails. Here are some scenic shots:

reflections in a pond along the Barnum Brook trail

Heron Marsh and Adirondacks in the distance

perhaps Barnum Brook

Fortunately, we were at a high enough latitude that we got back in time for sunset on the lawn of our motel back in Saranac Lake, even after taking a wrong turn on state highway 30 and getting a little closer to Canada than we intended. We even had time for some yummy treats from Mountain Mist Custard that were almost at the level of Classics Custard in Roswell, NM (worth going out of your way for!)

We weren't through with Adirondack scenery, though. The next day we took a different route back to Albany, bypassing Lake Placid (advised because a large Iron Man competition was going on that day) but still catching some of the area's fine scenery.

We let some cyclists out for their pre-race warmups pass us and stopped at a scenic pulloff to enjoy the reflections of hillside and cliffs in this mirror-like water....just another pond/lake in the Adirondacks.

To show you how little of this vast, beautiful area we were able to see, here are some stats on the Adirondacks from the eponymous museum:

yes, that's 2,759 lakes and ponds!

Next up: see more from this great museum and learn why this part of the world is a true historical treasure-house!

B-G-O!

We didn't just randomly decide to go to upstate New York on our annual sib-trip this year. There was a specific motivation.

For the first time in history, a player was going to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame as a Houston Astro. For non-baseball-fans, and even for baseball fans invested in other teams, this might not seem like a big deal, worth traversing the continent for. But for us, it was.

Other players who have worn Astros unis, some even for a fairly long stint, are in the Hall, as you can see on the back of my souvenir t-shirt:

But only the guy at the top of the lefthand column, whose Hall plaque, recently unveiled, is shown above, went in as a 'Stro. And even better, he played all of his seasons with our team. Starting in 1988 and playing until 2008, with one team?! This is practically unheard of in modern sports. You can see a photo gallery of him in action here on the Astros website.

So, when Biggio's election was announced in January, we started making plans. Cooperstown, New York, is a small town sort of in the middle of nowhere, but we found other attractions to amuse us before and after the big day (which was July 26).

And Steve found other amusements on the day itself; having a non-fan in the family actually worked out well for us, since he was able to drop us off and pick us up, eliminating the need for finding parking. Finding seating was another matter, though, since we knew there would be a big crowd and we were not buying close-in seats.

The only way to manage was to get there early. Even though we were overnighting in Albany, to avoid scandalous hotel prices in Cooperstown, we thought it was worthwhile hit the road early. We hit our target time of 9:30 pretty much on the nose and were glad we did, grabbing a nice area right in the center of a sloping berm. Here's the view from our seats soon after our arrival:

Yes, that's the stage 'way in the distance, but there was a video screen and we thought being on the hill would be cooler than being down on the flat area. And this turned out to be true. It was much hotter than Texans were expecting summer New York weather to be, but this slight discomfort didn't spoil the thrill for us. We were so pleased to be among probably the largest group of true Astros fans you could imagine. Memories of Astros-Cubs home games when Cub jerseys out-numbered the hometown unis were erased by the site of all the Biggio jerseys we saw.

this adorable munchkin had a jersey matching his dad's (on the right)

And of course we added to the total:

Although we think Astros jerseys were the most numerous in the crowd, we were probably out-done in the noise department by Pedro Martinez' Dominican partisans. But they were obviously having such a good time, and they put on such a fun show, that we didn't mind.

For such a large and important gathering, the whole feel of the operation was very small-townish. No admission fees or metal detectors, high school kids selling concessions (although an admittedly limited choice of food options: hot dogs and chips. Period! Plus they ran out of water before the show was over!), and families with coolers, balls, and gloves, setting up impromptu games for the kids. Not to say that important matters were overlooked; it was probably the best-supplied operation, porta-potty-wise, that any of us had ever had experience with...

And our four-hour wait for the festivities to begin was very entertaining. From watching the spaces fill up (see below), to watching kids running makeshift bases, to some entertaining videos on the big screen, it was very enjoyable.

Here's a look at the "hillside" we were on, after it had gotten pretty filled up:

And to give you an idea of how much/how little space was left at showtime, here are two shots of the space in front of us, occupied by a family with a very handy canopy-tent...very welcome shade, appropriately decorated:

just setting it up

close to showtime

They could have handled a few more fans, I guess. But it was a good crowd all the same. Estimates I saw said 45,000.

And here's the ultimate fan experience: Bigg giving his speech. The red box is around him and the podium. The sound was fine, though, and we heard every word.

This was really the thrill of a lifetime for fans who've followed the team, more or less, since its beginnings as the Colt .45s in 1962. Although Biggio's longtime teammate Jeff Bagwell deserves to be in the Hall, too, I'm sadly resigned to the fact that he probably won't make it, being tarred with the PED brush that's undeserved in his case. 

However, if my pessimism is unfounded, we'll know exactly where to go to see his induction, what to bring—more water, one of those neat canopy-tents, good chairs (thank goodness we were able to borrow some from Amy's friends this time, as we were woefully ill-equipped for 7 hours of sitting), and more food than a granola bar to supplement the kids' hot dogs. We'll be all set!

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Next up, some of our ancillary sight-seeing and activities.

Wordless Wednesday: unexpected variations

Multi-trip teaser

Whew! I just got home from a great, but insanely complicated, little vacation. My sister calculated that I'd slept in 12 beds in the just under 3 weeks that I was away from steamy south Texas.

It will take me a while to organize my photos and decide how to tell you about my continent-spanning (almost) journeys. But here's a few views to whet your appetites, and to give you an idea of how varied was the scenery and and how far-ranging were my experiences:

A couple of these shots might give you some clues as to the main event that was the impetus for this unusual vacation. I'll tell you about that next time.