We decided to go exploring today since our neighbors were ugly and unsociable and we did the right thing. We started by driving to the Eisenhower Lock on the Seaway and watched as it operated, moving ships upstream toward the Great Lakes. We started by watching a movie in the visitor center that may have been made quite some time ago. The narrator and host of the video was Walter Cronkite and he appeared to be about 30 when this piece of journalistic wonder was created. Young Walter explained lots of things about the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway where before was only the St. Lawrence River with rapids and nasty shoals that prevented navigation except by thrill-seekers in rubber rafts or kayaks.
Right about time the movie ended, a ship called the Manitoba pulled into the empty lock and tied up. The gate at the lower end of the lock closed and 7 minutes and 22 million gallons of water later, the upper gate opened and the Manitoba belched out a big cloud of diesel smoke and steamed away up the next section of the Seaway. It is pretty amazing to watch a 650 foot long, 70 foot wide ship rise 48 feet out of a trench right before your eyes. Great mechanical engineering here.
We piled back into Charlotte and drove through a tunnel that passes beneath the lock to an island on the other side of the lock. There is an overlook on that side and we watched an oil tanker pull into the lock and repeat what we had just seen the Manitoba do. It is pretty amazing to watch these boats go through this process. When the ship pulls into the lock, viewers look down on the deck. A few minutes later, they are looking at the side of a ship awaiting the opening of the upper lock gate. Then it fires up and leaves.
We drove around the area of the lock and found two dams that block the rest of the river; one that generates hydroelectric power (which is sold to pay for the lock system) and another which merely regulates the flow of the St. Lawrence. At the visitor center for the hydro dam, we got out to take pictures and found that the 18th of July is some kind of special day and they had a Good Humor truck in the parking lot doling out free ice cream. We stupidly selected Reese’s ice cream bars that taste like cold peanut butter with a thin chocolate coating. Not the best selection we could have made. Maybe we should have selected potato ice cream bars or beet sidewalk sundaes although I don’t know if they had those.
The Seaway is an amazing engineering feat that extends over about 750 miles of territory stretching from Montreal to Lake Superior. The locks within American territory are free to pass through but I understand that those rotten Canadians charge to pass through their seven lock systems. Cheapskates.

We departed from Peru, NY and struck out going west to Cole Creek State Park in Waddington, NY. Despite our picking the specific site in advance from the Internet, we ended up in an absolutely beautiful campsite right on the south shore of the St. Lawrence Seaway.
The site was very spacious and we backed up on the grass in such a way that all of the Barbarian’s windows looked out on a panoramic view of the Seaway. The site to camp is only $20 per night but the state of New York charges more for what they refer to as “amenities,” which, in our case, meant 30 amp power only. There is no wi-fi, no water, no sewer and no phone but the view was absolutely stunning. From our chairs behind the trailer our view was of a sliver of grass in the immediate foreground, mid-scene was the Seaway with big ships running upstream towards the Great Lakes and Canada on the opposite shore. We broke out a bit of porter and set up our chairs for an afternoon of loafing and staring into the great view. Peg popped up to look at something in the Seaway and noticed two little mink that were scurrying among the big boulders that provide shoreline protection below our viewing station. Local park staff tried to identify them as ferrets (which are not indigenous to NY), squirrels and raccoons. We elected to disregard their knowledge since we can identify ferrets, squirrels and raccoons and these critters were not any of those.
Our neighbors were a bit strange. The folks to the west of us never came out of their coach – ever. The neighbors to the east arrived about an hour after we set up pulling an enormous fifth wheel with a big one-ton Dodge pickup. They were quite unfriendly and very corpulent. The hubby was a fat ginger with an enormous round head and the wife had big rolls of gelatinous, quivering blubber liberally distributed on her ass and thighs. Our meek attempts to speak with them were soundly rebuffed with non-committal grunts and looks of disdain. Fortunately, we could easily ignore them because they were camped on the side of the Invader we do not use except for hooking up utilities.
Cole Creek State Park is a beautiful camp spot so we were quite happy despite the expensive (lack of) amenities and the grumpy and ugly neighbors. We have noted that despite our unremarkable appearance and advanced age, we are maybe some of the most attractive folks in the state. There are a lot of ugly people here in spite of this being The Big Apple and the most magnificent place in the universe with wonderful people according to the promotional literature available to tourists.

Today we woke up well rested after getting to sleep in a place that seems absolutely silent at night. Our explorations commenced with a fuel stop and then we proceeded directly into New York’s Adirondack Park. We drove south on I-87 where I gave Peg lousy directions and we missed the correct exit for the road west. After only about 8 miles of wasted fuel, we got onto either 9N or Hwy 86 headed toward Lake Placid, a region where NY has hosted two winter Olympic Games. It is a beautiful drive up what I think is the Ausable River through Clintonville, Au Sable Forks (funny spelling intentional), Jay, Wilmington (don’t eat at the A&W here) and finally into Lake Placid. The cascading river and all the towns along the way are really pretty, as is Lake Placid itself, but the town of Lake Placid is a tourist Mecca, even in the summer. The tourists seem quite happy shopping in myriad upscale boutiques, frequenting overpriced hotels with phony alpine architecture and otherwise getting fleeced. It is pretty dreadful.
We were finally able to emerge from the town’s series of roads that are almost completely blocked by morons attempting to find street-side parking where there was none and exited again on 86 for the drive on to Saranac Lake. Saranac has substantially wider roads clogged by substantially fewer morons and is quite pretty. It surrounds a scenic mountain lake and the views from the highway are very nice. There are a bunch of classic early 20th century buildings and the masonry Saranac Hotel dominates the skyline at the west end of the lake. I like this place much better than the town of Lake Placid but shoppers in an endless quest for Chinese and Malaysian garments offered at high prices may disagree with my assessment. On the way out of town, we found a gorgeous house built entirely of mortared cobbles that sits at the end of a street where we found the house of Robert Louis Stevenson. He wrote great books from inside a dinky little cottage that looks more like a place I would live than the residence of a famous author. Nice, but plain. No driveway.
We returned from this part of the world on NY Hwy 3 which ultimately delivered us to Plattsburgh, NY, which is a neat little city filled with gorgeous houses and more very impressive early 20th century era buildings. There is a statue of Sam Champlain and some really beautiful municipal buildings in town along with a great view of Lake Champlain and Vermont, across the lake. From Plattsburgh, we headed south down Hwy 9 to an attraction called Ausable Chasm. There are spectacular views of thundering waterfalls if you get out of your car and walk out on the stone Hwy 9 bridge over the chasm. If you cross to the other side of the bridge, you can look down the chasm and watch the river disappear through some formidable rapids down a rock gorge that is magnificent. This place is definitely one of those where getting out of the car and strolling out onto the bridge is worthwhile but it is not for those afflicted with any form of acrophobia. It is a long way down. Those with lots of time can pay to enter the adjacent privately-owned attraction site for whitewater rafting, tubing, bus rides and other touristy stuff on the rapids as long as they are willing to part with about $30 a head. We left $60 richer.

We woke up at our usual reasonable time of about 8:45 and performed our preparations for departure. We were fed, packed up and exiting the park before 11:00. Vermont is pretty rustic with few roads going anywhere other than directly between towns, most of them single lane each way, but they are wide enough to accommodate our Charlotte towing the enormous Barbarian Invader without terrifying the driver or his passenger, Peg. The roads are well maintained and we made pretty good time despite the unnaturally low speed limits. Very few places have speed limits above 45 miles per hour but we were happy to trudge along and admire the spectacular scenery of this state.
Someone told us that Charles Kuralt, who used to have a segment on a Sunday morning news show, stated that the U.S. interstate system was a network of roads where you could drive coast-to-coast without seeing anything on the way. In most cases, we would have to agree but we found a spectacular exception. Approaching Rutland, VT, we entered U.S. Highway 4 which is the most stunningly gorgeous freeway drive either of us has ever traveled. It is a two lane each way road with a median so wide you frequently cannot see the traffic going the other way. The road has ever-changing vistas, gently rolling emerald green hills, nice wide lanes and very limited access making for a very pleasant drive into New York.
However, as soon as you cross into New York state at Whitehall, the roads immediately turn to potholed, narrow tracks with signage that would confuse even the locals. We turned north on either Hwy 22 or 9N (we could not tell which) that snakes along the east side of Lake Champlain. This route, although marked as RV friendly in our handy Good Sam Club atlas, is a terrifying assortment of narrow, twisting alleys liberally punctuated with sunken grades, oncoming drivers unaccustomed to driving in their lane and sinuous pathways through riverside communities that consider road maintenance bothersome so they leave it undone. After more of this than either of us wanted, we finally emerged from the zone of horror onto I-87, a well-maintained, excellent freeway quite unlike any roads we have experienced in our NY travels. We picked up I-87 at exit 35 and only followed it to exit 37 where we exited to our new campsite in Peru, NY. The new place is called Iroquois Campground and it is really quite nice. It has full hook-ups but there is no TV and the wi-fi is extremely shaky. The campground, however, is very pretty and situated in a nice grove of trees with good roads although they have some nasty intentional speed bumps so drivers are obliged to slow down from 3 mph to 2 mph. It is very quiet. The silence was a panacea for our shattered nerves from NY rural transit.

We were awakened to the light drumming of rain on the Invader and democratically decided to lay low and limit our activities to lounging near the campsite. After a few cups of coffee laced with Irish Creme, however, we decided to do a little exploring of the Springfield area. We hopped into Charlotte for a spin about the area and started our explorations by driving all the way to North Springfield which looks a lot like Springfield except that it has no interesting buildings, no interesting houses and ordinary roads with secret identification signs so tourists like us will be unable to find their way to all the uninteresting stuff North Springfield possesses. We did find a back road which would lead us back to a highway giving us an alternate route back to Springfield that almost instantly turned to dirt or gravel. It was hard to tell which it might be since it was raining and, when wet, appeared to be mud. It was a nice drive through unexplored territory on the west side of Springfield with neat little farms surrounding decrepit residences with ample junk in their yards. Very snazzy.
On our way back from this short foray into rural Vermont, we stopped at a grocery store called Shaw’s which had prices that may make one appreciate the benefits of competition because normally cheap items like potatoes and apples had prices that are normally found only in upscale neighborhoods like Beverly Hills or La Jolla, CA. After parting with more money than we should have for fewer items than we wanted, we consoled ourselves by returning to the Shanghai Gardens restaurant for more very reasonably priced Chinese food served by folks wearing the same shorts, wife beaters and cheap zories they were sporting yesterday. Although their attire may not be spiffy, the food is very tasty and the prices were dirt cheap – appetizers and two meals with egg rolls, wonton soup, fried rice, pineapple chunks and fortune cookies for $26.
Mutually deciding to curtail our exciting activities for the day, we drove back to the Tree Farm campground to steel ourselves for tomorrow’s drive into upstate New York. Tree Farm is a gem of a campground with all the stuff you might want in an RV camping venue and without any interference from your neighbors who you can hardly see since the place has big sites with timber between spaces. We found out they had adequate security when we elected to take a drive around the entire campground to see how many folks were in the campground and were followed home by one of the campground operators. He was very nice and explained that he only followed us around to make sure we were registered guests and not merely casing the joint for easy pickings. Whatta guy.