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Published: October 28th 2007
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Obfuscator writes: The vast improvements over Day 60 started early, when we left our motel room to find that it was not raining. Cranberry Lake was pretty in the daylight, though the town bearing the same name had little to offer. We drove on toward Lake Saranac, and Lake Placid. If you like nice little lakes in wooded mountains with fall colors, this is a great place to visit, particularly in the fall.
We took a little walk around in Lake Saranac, since it had a visitor's center with a stoplight on top of its tower. It also had large friendly bears in its lakeside park, bearing somewhat disturbing looking fish. There was a river walk that was rather scenic, with a well done mural under the main bridge. It looked like a fun town, with lots of galleries and shops, but I think we both figured that it was basically a tourist trap, and moved on.
Lake Placid, as it turns out, is home to more than lake monsters. It was also home to some Olympics, apparently. They have all sorts of structures in the town dedicated to winter athletics, and the old ski jumps nearby. The ski
jumps are open to tourists, but you have to get a ticket, and you have to make sure you go to the right parking lot to do so. If you go to the other parking lot, you'll be annoyed like we were, that there was no ticket booth. Near the wrong parking lot is John Brown's farm. He lived there less than a year, before going to Kansas to fight slavery advocates there. After he was executed, his remains were brought to his farm, where his wife and some of their children still lived, and he was buried there. Two of his sons that fought with him at Harper's Ferry, as well as a bunch of others of his would-be-revolutionaries are also buried there. North of Lake Placid is a lovely area called High Falls Gorge. The falls themselves are only accessible through some horrible road-side travesty that charges more than $10 per person just to see them, so while they looked like they'd be pretty, we decided we had better ways to spend our time, and money.
The road before you get to the falls themselves runs right along the rapids that precede the falls, and they're really
quite picturesque themselves. We spent a fair amount of time climbing around on the rocky river bank for a lot of pictures, before moving on toward Fort Ticonderoga. We got to the town of Ticonderoga, and stopped in a replica of John Hancock's house that they use as their historical society. It was sort of a neat place in and of itself, but we were disappointed to hear from them that Fort Ticonderoga was closed for the season. We had to double back to Crown Point, at the base of Lake Champlain (where we passed the home of Champ, the Lake Champlain version of Nessie), where we found that there was really only one historical site of interest open in New York. The fort at Crown Point was apparently the largest in British North America, until it mostly burned down in a freak gunpowder accident in 1773. The British had stolen the site from the French during the French and Indian War, though it took them four failed attempts before they met with success, and then only because they brought 12,000 men with them. At Crown Point, you can see the remains of the old French Fort, as well as
the remains of the British fort, and a fairly slick museum. There's also a big statue of Champlain across the highway.
After crossing over into Vermont, we were disappointed to find that basically everything was closed there too. On the plus side, gas was cheaper. We tried to find camping in the Green Mountains National Forest, since there were quite a few spots marked on our map. The first we stopped at was a State Park, which was closed. The second we found parking for, but couldn't find any markings for the campground. The third, we drove well into the Green Mountains for, only to find closed. Eventually, we pulled out in a remote part of the National Forest, where we certainly didn't camp directly under the sign that said “No Overnight Camping.” The night was very cloudy, with all the cover moving fast overhead. I experimented with some long exposure shots of the clouds, since with the full moon, they looked pretty neat.
Onaxthiel learns things! These things include: If you're going to lead a slave revolt, make sure you tell the slaves. Otherwise, you get to die isolated and alone, surrounded only by loved-ones who are
also being executed, and some un-fun Virginia soldiers. Also, if you pick a camping site that is sufficiently in the middle of nowhere, you don't get disturbed in the middle of the night. Vermont is one of the prettiest states we've seen so far, full of nice and reasonable people with funny accents. (Obfuscator adds: Who share their neighbor's proclivity for closing things far too early in the year, rather than keeping them open for midwestern vagrants.)
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