28th – 30th Aug: Days 142 – 144
We continued our journey across NY state and put in a 2 night stop in Watkins Glen. This little known corner of America is best known for a couple of things:
- The Glen: a smallish but beautiful steep sided gorge with some amazing rock formations and waterfalls, and a very lovely 1.5 mile walk up it.
- The Glen: a very well known motor racing track, if you know about these things. This was the first place to host a major car race following WW2 giving the petrol heads of this land somewhere to burn some gasoline and tyre rubber. In 1948 this started as a street race around the small town and graduated to a purpose built track 5 yrs later. It hosted Formula 1 Grand Prix 1961-1980 and remains an important NASCAR and INDYCAR venue as the premiere road racing venue in the USA. I, of course knew none of this.
We travelled from Niagara to Watkins Glen though the back roads of Up State New York. This area was a bit less polished than I had expected. More homes that needed repainting, more lawns un-mowed and a bit more junk in the gardens. Still very pretty though and we saw our first Amish horse and buggy on the road. We did a very small detour about 30 miles from our destination in order to visit the Corning Museum of Glass. This was established by the Corning Glass Works in 1951 in recognition of 100 years of manufacturing glass. The museum is now housed in a monumental purpose built building and has 45000 pieces of glass, some over 3500 years old. It was fantastic. The gallery areas were in huge minimalist spaces and the museum areas showed that those olden day folks knew some stuff too. There were even some science areas and demonstrations explaining fibre optics and such. The highlight was watching a live worship where a glassblower knocked up an amazingly ornate bowel in 20 minutes. Quite a talent.
After we had absorbed all the culture that we could accomodate, we headed off to Watkins Glen. The town is in an area called Finger Lakes, and sits at the lower end of Seneca Lake. This is one of a group of long thin glacial lakes and is 38 miles long. We got to our camp at about 5pm, on a lovely sunny evening. We set up and then wandered down to the park area on the lake edge to watch the sunset with a bottle of fizz and a bag of cheesy crisps; last event in the anniversary celebrations. I know, we are all class.
The next day, after a hearty brunch, we donned our walking shoes and set off to walk up the gorge path. The entrance was only about a mile from camp on the edge of town and on the way there we had a coffee sat on a bench on the main street and watched the world go by. There are a lot of trucks that go through this town, so this was not peaceful pastime. The pavements have plaques sunk into them, each commemorating a different race car driver that had won an event at The Glen. We came across this familiar name.
We found out that a few days after we leave here The Glen is hosting the Indycar Grand Prix. Nick was gutted to be missing it, but I reckon that finding accomodation would have been a little trickier. Anyhow, we have a date to pick up Rick in Burlington, so we must roll onwards!
The racetrack itself is not in town, and unfortunately we didn’t manage to get up to it. Wonder if we could have given Big Dave a bit of a thrash, Tin Can and all…?
The walk up into the Glen was lovely. There was a well formed stone path built into the side wall of the gorge and lots of great photo opportunities. Unfortunately we also lost these photos in the great memory-card disaster, but here is a stock photo.
That evening we walked back to town and had dinner and a drink sat up at the bar in the local craft brewery, Roosterfish. We got chatting to an interesting chap called Dries and spent a few hours swapping stories and anecdotes.