30th Aug – 3rd Sept: Days 144 – 148
The Adirondacks are a mountain range in Upstate New York and our journey across them started with an overnight stop in a riverside camp in a town called Poland. We underestimated the ability to buy fresh groceries in the town and ended up at the petrol station buying a salami and a tin of sliced mushrooms. Sara’s ‘invention test’ for dinner it was to be! It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, the camp had a lovely clean swimming pool and that was where we spent a couple of hours while the laundry was in progress. Multitasking extraordinaire. The main excitement of this stop was what we found to buy in the camp shop. Check out ‘Teeny Dave’. It was meant to be….
We had a lovely peaceful night and set off across the (small) mountains in the morning. The drive through the Adirondacks was very beautiful. Lovely wide smooth roads, swooping ups and downs rather than hard climbs, lots of handsome NY towns including Ithaca, home of Cornell University. (One of only 8 Ivy League Universities, the others being: Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, Uni of Pennsylvania, Princeton & Yale.) It was cool and there was suddenly a vague tinge of brown and yellow on some of the trees, as if autumn had suddenly hit today, on the 31st August. C’mon. Summer didn’t really start til the middle of July.
Our next stop was the bizarrely named ‘Ausable Chasm’. This is another deep steep sided narrow river gorge also known as the Grand Canyon of the Adirondacks. This is a bit of a leap of imagination, but it was cool. We had 2 nights here. The first was very quiet and we had our area of the campsite to ourselves. The second night was the Friday of a 3 day holiday weekend (Labor Weekend) and the camp was suddenly chock-a-block with folk getting away for the last weekend of summer. The chasm is privately owned, and there is a not-inconsiderable fee to walk through through it, and around the rim trails. You can also float down the river on a raft, or in a tube when the the weather is warm. We didn’t do any floating, but did a good enough walk to earn our dinner. It was quite impressive, but again, we lost these photos.
The highlight of this place was our evening at the Ausable Brewing Company. This was a nano-brewery a couple of miles cycle ride from camp. It is located down country lane in a red shed, surrounded by fields and flowers. It is run by two brothers and is only open 3 days a week (because they don’t make very much beer). On each of those evenings a different local food truck rolls up to feed the customers and there are tables and chairs dotted around the garden and in the adjoining open-sided barn. The sun was shining, there was a happy buzz of locals and holiday-makers, a tolerable smattering of kids, not enough dogs, the beer was excellent, the food truck was a was selling amazing BBQ ribs and there was some half decent live music from a man with a guitar. A bliss evening.
We managed to get home before darkness fully set in. Luckily the road home was quiet and our merry weaving didn’t leave us in a ditch.
The next day our plan had been to get up early and get the nearby ferry across Lake Champlain (I was previously convinced this was called Lake Champagne…) into the town of Burlington, Vermont, to spend the day mooching around, then pick up Nick’s brother Rick from Burlington airport at 4.30pm. We awoke to a message from Rick that his flight out of the UK had been cancelled and he was going to be delayed by 24 hours. This was a shame, as he was only coming for a week anyway. We had planned this week as mainly a Maine coastal trip, with 2 stops across country to get us there. The delay turned this into a one stop drive.
We got a later ferry, decided to bypass Burlington that day and headed off to our next stop in a village called Stowe. This was luckily only about 30 miles from Burlington, so we could easily go back to pick up Rick the next day, and then do a 3 hour drive to our next stop. On the way to Stowe we called in at the Ben & Jerry’s Factory Tour and Ice Cream Shop. Here they have a ‘Flavour Graveyard’ where all the past incarnations of their products are preserved. The original shop was opened in Burlington itself and interestingly Ben (Cohen) learned to make ice-cream by taking a correspondence course when he failed to get into medical school, and because he has no sense of smell or taste he put lumps and chunks in the ice-cream to give it mouth feel. Something that is very important for his own enjoyment of food. Oh, the facts just keep flowing’. Anyway. We called in with full bladders and low blood sugars, took one look at the crowds, saw that the only food on offer was ice-cream, had a wee, and got the hell out of dodge to find a proper lunch. This is to prove we were there.
Once installed in camp and on the other side of a sandwich we felt much more human and jumped on the bikes to explore Stowe. It was very pretty and gentile with a nice cycle path that we took a ride up as far as a mini-golf course. Here, in the baking sun, stuck behind a family with seemingly 17 kids and no sense of urgency, we had our second USA Mini Golf Challenge. Nick evened the score to one all.
In the morning it was hosing with rain, and was forecast to do the same all day. This makes packing up a bit miserable, but we were brave and soldiered on. We drove back to Burlington and considering it was Sunday the place was jumping. Tons of traffic, people everywhere and queues forming at all the restaurants for lunch. Crazy. We found somewhere to park, somewhere to eat, did a bit of shopping and then headed out to a supermarket near the airport for a proper stock up for the impending arrival. As we were negotiating our way through town Rick rang with more bad news. His flight into Newark had been delayed and despite a 3 hour connection, he had not managed to make his flight to Burlington. The next flight wasn’t until the next morning. Blood and Sand. We quickly discussed some other options, but in the end, waiting until the morning was going to be the best of a bad bunch. Now we were going to have to do a planned 2 night trip across country in one epic day. The man wanted a bit of a USA road trip, that’s what he was going to get, by crikey.
Our next dilemma? Where to stay that cold rainy night? A hotel, that’s where! Some hasty research was done, and we were soon booked into the nearby Best Western which had an attached bar/restaurant and a room with 2 beds and a bath. Every cloud has a silver lining. We did our shopping, started the generator so we could open up TinCan, put the shopping away and pack our overnight bags (aka the shopping bags) and within half an hour I was luxuriating in the tub. We had a nice dinner sat at the bar, a terrible night’s sleep (unfair) and were at the airport by 9am to finally greet our visitor.