We woke up late and kicked off the day with coffee and Irish Creme. Afterwards we hopped into Charlotte and initiated our explorations for today by driving through the campground to recon the area. A portion of the campground borders Lake Ontario so we gave that a sniff first. When you find an access to the beach between all the “seasonals” you emerge to the edge of the lake and find there really isn’t much of a beach at Brennan Beach in spite of the name. The water in the Lake near the edge is sort of a murky brown color so swimming seemed right out. Looking east along the south shore reveals a long curving coastline with emerald green foliage that is quite beautiful. Looking west you are treated to a nice view of a nuclear reactor with an enormous cooling tower with big clouds of steam emanating from the top.
Abandoning our campground reconnaissance, we drove southwest along the shore of Lake Ontario and found another nuclear reactor and some big power plants generating power by burning something. We continued until we reached Oswego, NY, which is a nice city with lots of gorgeous architecture. The roads are shit but the scenery in this part of the world is great. We popped into a War of 1812-era fort on the shore of the lake and noted that the Corps of Engineers was rebuilding the breakwaters which protect Oswego from certain death in the winter. I imagine the lake freezes here, at least along the shoreline. In any event, the Corps was placing big concrete things that look like enormous jacks or anchors along with giant boulders in an attempt to replace sections of the old breakwater that was very porous and exhibited large gaps.
We found our miserable phone service works in Oswego so we made some campground reservations and chatted with Dana, our daughter, back in San Diego. It is always nice to hear the kids since we do not see them while traveling. We headed back towards our campsite from Oswego on Hwy 104 which only had one 10 mile long detour before returning to the Invader. The drive through the countryside here is very nice with great scenery but rotten paving. We spotted numerous New Yorkers on the way back. They were almost all uglier than me, some by a substantial margin. However, some of them have neat old cars.