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.