Our Great Northeast Adventure (part 2)

Day 10:  Ok…let me see if I can catch you up on the last five days.  When I last left off, we were about to leave Tennessee and get on the Blue Ridge Parkway…which we did.  It was an absolutely gorgeous drive.  It travels along the ridge of the mountains (hence the name), so it was curvy, hilly, and foggy.  It was still drizzling rain along, so we were only managing about 20 mph on average.  After about 50 miles, we realized that we had to change our route, or we would never get to Roanoke, VA!  We hated to leave the Parkway, because it was so beautiful.  There were waterfalls all alongside the road!  We hope to return someday to make the Parkway our destination, rather than a corridor leading somewhere else. 

 

After spending the night in Roanoke, we decided to try one more time to drive a little further on the Parkway.  Alas, it was closed to traffic.  I guess it was just too treacherous with all of the rains.  So we made good time on the highway.  Since we had time to spare, we stopped in Staunton, VA (first settled in 1732, and the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson).  They had a really nice Frontier Culture Museum!  It took up MANY acres and depicted where the early settlers had come from (with buildings taken from the actual countries), as well as showing how they incorporated their different cultures to create their new homes in America.  We spent a couple of hours exploring everything from a west African village to American homesteads from the 1700 and 1800’s.

We passed through a small section of West Virginia and Maryland and then entered Pennsylvania.  I LOVE Pennsylvania!  It is such a beautiful state…beautiful green hills, forests and pristine farmland (with the obligatory red barns!).  The colors in the higher elevations were really starting to get good, and every once in a while, we’d run across a particular tree that just glowed.  We spent the night in Harrisburg and then headed into New York state the next day.

We arrived in Niagara Falls around 4:30 on Thursday (10/1) night.  We quickly settled into our hotel and took off walking toward the falls.  The town is awful…very glitzy and very crowded, with horrible parking (as is the case in most tourist attraction towns).  We walked into the Niagara Falls State Park and found 2 or 3 good sites to view the falls.  There just aren’t words adequate to describe the falls.  Every single angle you view them from is breathtaking.  We were about to starve, so we walked back to our room, looked up a place to go get some “real New York pizza” and drove into the (non-touristy) part of town.   After finishing our delicious supper, we walked down to a different vantage point to view the falls at night.  They were mesmerizing!

I had been battling a sore throat and earache all week and woke up feeling pretty lousy Friday morning.  We decided the best thing for us to do was find a place for me to see a doctor.  Our friendly “information lady” at the hotel sent us to the ER of the local hospital.  (All of the service people we have dealt with on this trip have been very friendly and helpful!)  We spent several hours waiting to find out that I have an URI (sounds better than saying a cold) and an ear infection.  So she gave me an antibiotic and a prescription to get filled, and I went back to our room to lay around all day.  Dennis did a little more exploring on his own.  I finally decided to go out on the observation deck, behind the visitor center, which is the best (land) view from the US side.  It actually goes out over the river for a better vantage point.  (Neither one of us wanted to spend the money or fight the crowds or get wet by going on a boat ride up to the falls.)  We went back to the bottom of the observation deck that night.  They usually have fireworks on Friday nights, but they had to cancel because of the wind (gusts up to about 40 mph). 

That brings us up to today.  We left Niagara Falls this morning and headed east.  We had about 3 hours of interstate driving before we turned north into the Adirondack Mountains.  (We did see a couple of deer and several woodchucks along the freeway, though.)  We both fell in love with these mountains!  The drive today has been amazing!  The trees still aren’t at their peak, but the percentage of color is over 50% in a lot of places.  We kept hoping to catch sight of a moose, but no luck!  We had reservations at a B&B in Lake Placid, which we reached about 4:30.  This town is NOT what we expected!  If you like pure tourist traps, come to Lake Placid.  Otherwise, I’d caution against it.  We plan to leave early in the morning, find a quiet place in the country to worship, and then head on over to Vermont.