Watkins Glen and Surrounds

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Hi folks.



Time to catch up a bit. It is 6pm Tuesday 8^th.



I’m writing up the last 2 days as a ‘Word’ document but don’t know when I’ll get internet access to cut and paste it into the Blog website and publish it, but I’ll write it up anyway and have it ready to go.



Yesterday was Monday 7^th and we woke up at Keuka Lake, rather later than usual…….again….. to a rather overcast and dull day. We heard a very heavy shower while we still lying in bed so we thought ‘what the heck’, not worth hurrying out of bed!!!



We ended up having another lovely, much needed relaxing day by the lake doing exactly…….nothing!!!!except sit by the lake in some lovely comfortable lakeside chairs chatting to the lovely people who owned the house we were staying in, and the Pearce’s and reading and dodging the frequent rain showers that were always followed by the sun. And real humidity. It was a weird weather day and couldn’t male up its mind what it wanted to do. The locals appeared very ‘put out’ by the weather but I kept telling them all that it wasn’t a problem…..’a bad day at the beach/lake was still better than a good day at work!!!’



So it was one of those days BUT we both thoroughly enjoyed it never-the-less. Keuka Lake was just a lovely spot to stay at for a couple of days.



(Albert had had to go home the evening before as he is working at a ‘rest home’ in Watkins Glen as the ‘maintenance man’ for a friend who had gone to Europe on holiday)



We packed up everything and left for Watkins Glen around 4pm and got home just as the heavens opened and it ‘bucketed down’ with real torrential type rain for sometime. A nice quiet evening ensued chatting and reading and we had an EARLY NIGHT!!!!!!in bed by 9.30pm. Believe it or not relaxing and doing nothing at the lake was tiring work!!!! Jeeeeeez, we must be getting old!!!!not able to hack the pace anymore.



Tuesday was a 7.30am start with showers and breakfast etc. and I put in a load of laundry as we were starting to run low on the essentials again. Tjis got hung on the outside line just before we left for the day. Albert went off to work just after 8pm and we packed up Judy’s car with a chilly bin of drink and water etc. and headed off around 9am for our day at the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon and Wellsboro. It was a lovely warm day with rain and the possibility of thunderstorms later in the day.



We headed off taking in the scenery as we went. We drove through a lot of cropping country where maize, grain, pumpkins etc. were being grown. Still not a lot of animals on the land although we did see a smallish dairy farm over near Wellsboro. Rather strange to drive through so much farm country but not see animals in the paddocks!



Our first stop, after a quick stop at Becky’s in Painted Post near Corning to drop off some bits and pieces from the lake trip, was at the Pennsylvania Information Centre just over the New York State/ Pennsylvania State border. This was a magnificent newish, large building that had more brochures on display than I have ever seen at an Information Centre anywhere. It was really well done.



From there we headed to Wellsboro and largish, very old town that was really beautiful. The main street was very wide and they had real gas street lanterns right down the middle of the main street divide. I’m hoping one of Joy’s photos will show them.



We drove through the tow, this time, and headed to the Grand Canyon just a few miles away.



What a beautiful area. Nothing like THE Grand Canyon. This was all trees and woods with the Pine Creek at the bottom of the canyon. Very picturesque. There was a large lookout area that gave us great views of the canyon etc. etc. All around the gardens at this lookout area were huge beds of rhododendrons, the tall variety, that were all past flowering except one bush. What a sight this would be if the rhodos were in bloom. One might be tempted to come back at sometime just to see it (did I really say that????) in May when they would be blooming.



We spoke to a couple of Amish ladies who were there and they were interesting to speak to. Both in their traditional Amish garb and just waiting on their husbands who were down the bottom of the canyon riding a cycle trail. Judy found out that they came from an area where there was a farm that milked sheep to make cheese. She had never heard of sheep being milked before so it was an educational trip for her as well!!!



After about an hour or so there, and the purchase of a souvenir hoodie sweat shirt for Joy (she liked it because it had a local black bear on the front) and a fridge magnet, we headed back to Wellsboro for lunch. As we entered the town it started to pour and it bucketed down in torrents for about 5 minutes before clearing up and



We had read a brochure with the lunch menu for the Penn Wells hotel before leaving home and liked the look of it so we stopped there at 1.30pm for lunch. What a magnificent old building four storeys high and built in the mid 1880s. You can imagine what it was like, beautiful wood paneling everywhere, beautiful carpets on the tiled floor and a dining room that was simply amazing. We were the only people there but it was a very ‘formal’ dining room with white dinner service on every table. A ‘maitre’d’ took us to a table and the waitress came etc. etc. We felt very special as we ordered one of their lovely ‘sandwiches’, which are really more like a burger. Joy and I had a Chicken Cordon Bleu which featured a full chicken breast with the rest of the makings. It was extremely enjoyable and very reasonably priced for the sort of setting we were sitting in.



We then went wandering around the town’s shop for a short time. Joy just ‘had’ to buy a few things that took her fancy…..of course!!



We then motored home along a different route for half of the return trip, again driving through cropping areas before stopping for an ice-cream at the Blackbear Peaches’n’Cream ice-cream shop in Painted Post. Man alive, the ice-creams were humungous!!!!. We had a children’s size that cost around $1.50 and it was huge…..2 big scoops on a cone and a selection of flavours that was incredible. I had ‘black raspberry’ and Joy had ‘chocolate peanut butter’. They were delish!!!!!



We then shopped for some fruit and veges and an ‘Aldi’ supermarket, although I use that term loosely. It was a rather strange supermarket to us as it almost had no selection of anything. Appeared to me to be really big on snack type foods and fruit and veges but short on most other things, or that’s how it appeared to me. I wanted to buy some shaving cream but they had none and no toiletries at all. Never mind, I dare say other shops carry those, just seemed a bit different!!!



We motored the 20 minutes home and arrived just as the heavens opened again and we were treated to about an hour or so of fierce thunder, lightning and winds with torrential rain. We grabbed the washing off the line as we arrived home and just as it started to pour so t only needed 15 minutes in the drier to finish it off.



That’s Monday and Tuesday at Watkins. I’ll add to this over the next day or so and get it published with some photos as internet access permits.



It’s now Wednesday, 8.30pm and today has been another sightseeing day in the Finger Lakes area.



After getting up around 7.15am and doing all the usuals, Judy drove us down to the car park at the Watkins Glen Walmart where we met her friends Bonny and Jim, who had visited for the day at Keuka Lake earlier in the week. They were to be our ‘tour guides’ for our day trip to Taughannock Falls and Ithaca. These are over near Cayuga Lake, another of the Finger Lakes.



A drive of about 30 miles through rolling farm country that was mostly cropping land did, however, include a drive past a massive dairy farm, Bergen Farm, that milks 4000 head all day in huge rotary milking sheds, and also carries, apparently, another 4000 replacement stock. This was a massive series of barns as the cows are all kept indoors and hard fed. We saw the biggest silage pits we have ever seen, I kid you not. They were breathtaking in size and appeared to be prepared the same as our silage at home. But can you imagine the number of old tyres that were holding the pit covers down??? It was all a sight to behold. Apparently they are basically milking 24 hours a day. The smell as we drove past was as you would expect with that many animals housed inside. We did see 2 huge ‘treatment ponds’ for the effluent as well.



We then drove on to Taughannock Falls, named by the original Indian tribe from the area and means something like ‘In the Trees’. We first saw the falls, that are claimed to be higher that the Niagara Falls, from a lookout area built out of the shale stone that covers the area. The falls were running high as there had been around 25mm of rain in the area overnight so the water level as high and it was very dirty. However this didn’t at all detract from the beauty of the falls.



We then walked about a kilometre alongside the river back up to the Falls and were able to view them from ground level and very close up. Magnificent sight!!!



After walking back to the car park we drove over the road and drove around a bit of the Cayuga Lake frontage which is a huge park like area with playgrounds, open grass parks, boat ramps and marinas and it was really a lovely area.,



We drove into the city of Ithaca that sits on the shores of Cayuga Lake and is home to the very huge and famous ‘Ivy League’ Cornell College or University (more on that later). We went into the centre of Ithaca which is basically a university city, and had lunch at a very popular restaurant called ‘Moosewood’ where we had to wait for a table, it was that popular. The point of difference was that Moosewood was a 100% vegetarian restaurant with most menu choices being ‘vegan and gluten free’ as well……a bit different for us anyway. However we had lovely meals, without meat, Joy had a broccoli frittata and I had a Basmati rice dish which had raisins and cashew nuts on it along with a cucumber dressing. It came with a lovely salad that had a choice of several lovely dressings. Serving sizes were a little small but it was tasty food, even without any meat!!!!!



We then drove up to Cornell and drove around the university which is simply MASSIVE. The campus is the size of a small city on it’s own and seemed to go on and on and on for ever. It is a very prestigious uni and covers just about every field of education plus some!!!



The ladies wanted to go to the botanical part of the establishment which featured massive gardens with thousands of different flowering plants. They just loved it!!!!and fortunately for Jim and I it started to rain rather heavily just as we got there so we headed back to the dryness of the car while the 3 ladies wandered around the gardens admiring the flowers etc. Joy took a heaps of photos, as you would expect!!!



We then went up to the Dairy part of the university. They apparently have a dairy farm somewhere and they process all the milk in this section of the varsity where they have what looked like a small version of a full diary factory alongside all their dairy research laboratories. The main purpose of visiting here was that they made their own ice-cream and sold it at a very modern ice-cream parlour in the big dairy building. Boy, it was good ice-cream!!!!! We wandered upstairs and looked into the dairy factory which has huge observation windows all along it, however it wasn’t working at the time.



It was starting to head towards 4.30pm by this time and we headed towards home through more rolling cropping country after getting caught in the Ithaca rush hour traffic that appeared worse than driving on the Auckland motorway and this is a city of around 30000 people although I suspect that it swells to many more than that when the university is in full swing but it is currently their summer break. I’m sure Jim said the student population was around 30000 as well.



Home around 5.30pm and a light dinner and chat and then time to download photos and add this section to the blog.



I’m sorry this one is a bit long but with no internet access I’ve just kept writing this blog in Word. Tomorrow we are going to walk the Watkins Glen gorge and will then go to one of the local fast food outlets where they have free wifi and hook up to the internet and hopefully cut and paste this blog onto the system, hopefully with a few photos as well.



We head back to NYC on Friday where we are staying at the JFK Hotel which is close to JFK airport from where we fly to Hawaii on Saturday at 10am.



Hopefully we will have internet access at the hotel so I’ll add the final couple of days of our Watkins Glen leg of the journey from there.



So until next time, ‘Bye’ from us.

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Photos

The Pennsylvania Welcome Centre
As crossed the State Border from NY State

The Pennsylvania Grand Canyon
Very green as opposed to the 'other' Grand Canyon

The local wildlife
We haven't seen a real one but are assured that they are around in the woods

The Penn Wells Hotel where we had lunch
Fantastic old building built in 1860s