Last week's cabin fever left us with limited options for an escape. The Governor has basically confined us to the state of New York for now, and even if we snuck across the border and returned, the folks at Guthrie would be rather unhappy with Peg as a potential superspreader. Thus, we decided to venture out on Friday to the state capital of Albany.
"Wait. Albany? Why would you go there?" Peg got an incredulous look over an N95 mask from the surgeon on the other side of the drape.
"Well, we've never been," she answered in her sweet east Tennessee lilt, as if that explained everything.
"I guess after this you can say you have," the surgeon's focus returned to what we in the legal profession refer to as "the mass of blood and guts" in which he was poking around.
The weather has been incredible of late, cloudless and around 70 every day. We chose to fly rather than drive, adding some fun to the journey and compressing a three hour trudge to an hour.
I landed rather firmly a little after dark at Albany International, and we unloaded the Cardinal for our drive into town. This is one of the many things I love about general aviation--no TSA, no barefoot marches through a metal detector, no baggage claim. When it's time to go, we crawl behind the yoke, crank the motor, and are climbing out and on our way within ten minutes. After we land, I fill out my logbook and pull luggage out of the back while P grabs the rental car and pulls it up next the plane to load and go. We've become spoiled.
The windshield tour driving from the airport to town is unimpressive. Lots of boarded up old houses, and groups of bored young men drinking on the stoop and watching us roll through stop signs trying to present a moving target at all times. We finally turned the corner onto a beautiful row of old brownstones that could've been set in one of the nicest neighborhoods in NYC, or maybe even Savannah, and found our way to the Morgan State House Inn, our home for the next couple nights.
The inn itself is a stately old mansion built in the 1880s and home to a fairly well-known and well-traveled suffragette, with a lodging annex next door where we found our room. We bumbled down the street for a little nuclear-hot Thai food, then crashed for the night with no real plan for the next day.
I had a general sense that I wanted to drive toward the Adirondacks on Saturday, perhaps to see the famous chairs, so we meandered all over the capital for a half-hour trying to find a scenic road north, crossed the Hudson through the crumbling meth lab known as Troy, then were on our way up toward Saratoga Springs.
Mid-morning we stumbled across Saratoga National Park, scene of perhaps the most significant battle (well, two battles actually) of the Revolutionary War. It was here that Horatio Gates stopped and surrounded poor General Burgoyne, who had thought he was marching down from Canada to meet up with a British force led by General Howe marching north from New York City, but apparently Howe saw something shiny in the direction of Philadelphia and left poor Burgoyne to his fate. After Burgoyne was forced to surrender, the French decided we were the real deal and jumped into the fray on the side of the Americans. The rest is history.
I suspect all of us will remember where we were when the news outlets called the election for Joe Biden, just as when the Challenger exploded or the airliners hit the Twin Towers. We had just pulled into the parking lot of the closed Saratoga National Park visitor's center, and I had snapped this photo of P next to Ye Olde Social Distancing poster.
Olivia messaged P the news. P started to tear up. I would've done the same, but two large cups of coffee an hour before had me on a rather urgent quest for relief. My mother called to tell me the news--she also was almost overcome with emotion. I was almost overcome, as well, as I spied a porto-let from which a three-year-old was just emerging. "I couldn't make any pee pee come out!" she announced to her father. I had no such problem.
Saratoga is beautiful and remote--if you've ever been to Antietam, it's a similar vibe but bigger. We drove the nine mile car tour, with each stop along the way becoming less reflective as P articulated a need for champagne to celebrate this great day for democracy.
Here's the "Boot Memorial", marking the spot where Benedict Arnold was wounded in the leg leading a charge around the British left flank that carried the second day of battle for the good guys. His name appears nowhere on the monument. Apparently he ran into a little trouble later in his career, after getting mixed up with a Tory named Peggy.
The next town up the road was Schuylersville, a mostly run-down collection of Trump flag-festooned, crumbling row houses that probably smelled inside of pork grease, multigenerational body odor, and meth. We asked the nice young man at the liquor store, the nicest structure in town, where we could find cold champagne. He pointed us to a Mexican restaurant on the hill which, when we arrived, obviously had not been open in a couple months. Thankfully, ten miles up the road was the picturesque town of Saratoga Springs, where we paid sixty bucks for a $20 bottle of bubbly, and toasted this great day for our country.
Outside honking horns soon gave way to a spontaneous street party, a massive celebration of what may be the end of four very dark years. I'm told they shot off fireworks in London, and the church bells rang in Paris. This must be what VE Day felt like, if to a lesser degree and confined to only 51% of our population.
It was still only 2:30 in the afternoon, and we had no desire to go back to Albany. Slipping past the throngs and police barriers in our rental, we found the interstate and made our way north to Lake George, and that iconic lodge, the Sagamore.
Built as a playground for Manhattan's wealthy during the Gilded Age, the Sagamore has fallen on hard times once or twice over the last century or so, but now is restored to all of its former glory by a bunch of real estate developers from Palm Beach County. We had originally hoped to stay there, but it was full last weekend.
The views across the lake are spectacular.
And yes, they in fact had Adirondack chairs scattered around the grounds.
We had to sneak past the guard gate to get there, after he told us we couldn't go for a drink because of social distancing and all. We told him we just needed to pull forward and turn around, then drove to the inn and had a drink in their lakefront bar. Damn Southerners.
The next morning we enjoyed the spectacular remnants of fall foliage in our beautiful, leafy neighborhood,
then jumped on the tollway for a pilgrimage to Woodstock, 45 miles down the road.
Woodstock is sort of like Pigeon Forge for old hippies, only smaller and more quaint with lots of mid-19th century architecture. There is plenty of tie-dye for sale, along with homemade jewelry, hemp products, and of course t-shirts and hats letting the world know you've been to Woodstock.
I particularly enjoyed the leftie historical markers.
What they don't tell you is that the Woodstock music event five decades ago didn't actually happen here, but instead was held in a field in Bristol, forty miles away. I felt a little cheated.
All the same, Peg bought things, as is her custom on the road, and then it was time for a dash back to Albany, tossing our stuff in the Cardinal, and flying back to Corning on a perfect day over mountains that were just giving up the last of their fall color.
That may be the last trek for a while. Although we're pretty careful, with this most recent and widespread wave of the pandemic these two oldsters probably don't need to be venturing out and staying in hotels for the next little bit. We'll see how it goes.
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