Next Time Saranac

There is a scene in one of my favorite Steve Martin movies, LA Story, in which Chevy Chase walks into an overly pretentious restaurant named "L'Idiot", where he asks for a better table than his usual from the snooty maitre 'd, played perfectly by Patrick Stewart. When Chase is told that getting a better table is not possible, he asks, "Part of the new cruelty?"

"I am afraid so, sir."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVEmlyqDgFk

I'm not sure why that scene makes me laugh every time I see it, almost as much as the postprandial moment when the waiter arrives with what appears to be a cigar box, but ends up being full of differently flavored dental flosses. "Regular or diet?" he asks. Martin looks around and notices tables full of folks, happily flossing away the traces of their tiny meals. It is disgustingly funny stuff.

I thought of all that pretention and stupidity within an hour of arriving Friday night at the Interlaken Inn, on the hill above Mirror Lake in Lake Placid. The place was built over a century ago by a fellow with a bad habit of bringing European immigrant girls here on the promise they'd be married upon arrival, then keeping them as indentured servants to scrub the floors and provide whatever services the master of the house required. That sort of bad karma lingers, and this otherwise beautiful home drips with it.

P and I both endured long work days before our five-plus hour drive into the Adirondacks, our only sustenance since breakfast a bag of cheetos purchased at a gas station outside of Albany. We knew the last seating in the dining room was at 8:30, so upon our 8:45 arrival we adjourned to the bar for a glass of wine and, we hoped, an appetizer of some sort.

The bartender, Brian, took our query to the kitchen.

"I'm really sorry, but the chef says the kitchen is closed."

We looked around and saw folks around us digging into their salads.

Peg asked plaintively, a lovely Tennessean channeling Oliver Twist, "Can't they just throw together a cheese tray and some crackers back there?"

Brian disappeared around the corner and reemerged with two dinner rolls, apparently rescued off someone's plate. "This is the best we can do. Sorry."

We sullenly ate our rolls, telling Brian we didn't blame him for the fact that this entire situation was complete BS. We were tired. We were cranky. We were still sort of hungry.

After our doughy yeast roll feast, it was off to bed with hopes that things would get better the next morning.

They didn't. As we descended the stairs our owner emerged from the office, giving Peggy another chance to voice her displeasure. Like any good New Yorker, the owner blamed Governor Cuomo for our fast.

"If we serve anyone after 8:30, we're in trouble. We can't risk a $10,000.00 fine."

P wasn't buying it. "There were other people eating all around us. You'd get a fine for bringing us out a couple pieces of cheese?"

""Yes, I'm afraid we would." This struck both of us as nonsense, and P kept inching toward the door in an attempt to keep our host from digging the hole any deeper. Having been married to P for a while now, I see the wisdom in disengaging at moments like this. The fireplug did not.

"Do you want me to work you in for dinner tonight? We're full, but I can try to find a spot for you."

Peg was curt. "That won't be necessary."

"Do you have reservations somewhere else? Getting a table in town tonight will be tough."

"We don't want to eat here. Thank you."

Then came the Condor Death Stare. You never want to be the subject of the Condor Death Stare. The room suddenly turned icy, and even the demons left behind by the original owner fled in terror into the rafters.

Having burned that bridge, we ventured into Lake Placid for coffee and maybe a little breakfast. Even though you may never have been to Lake Placid, you'd recognize the place if you've ever been to Gatlinburg or any other cheesy, overcrowded tourist town filled with souvenir shops and overpriced dining establishments.

Except the dining establishments were almost entirely shuttered, due to Covid, except for take-out. It was really cold outside, and we wanted to go inside and sit down somewhere. The only restaurant on the main strip had a 55 minute wait for a table. I began to curse.

Finally, we tramped a half-mile down the hill to the Downtown Diner, where after a short wait we were seated, presented a feast of eggs and gravy and various morsels of fried goodness. We were even treated like humans. Obviously the new cruelty hadn't made it down the hill.

Our reasons for coming to Lake Placid were two-fold. First, this was a pilgrimage to the very spot where Peg placed fourth in figure skating at the Junior Olympics when she was twelve. We snapped a photo in front of the shrine on our walk back from breakfast. I couldn't find the plaque that recounted Peg's athletic feats there.

Our second goal for the trip was a ride on Lake Placid's famous dog sleds. Alas, this too turned out to be, well, a little less than we hoped.

Out behind restaurant row, on the frozen lake, one finds a single dogsled staffed by a couple burly guys and their squad of underfed-looking dogs, supposedly huskies but looking more like coyotes who'd been corralled and impressed into service dragging group after group of squealing nine-year-olds and their parents across the ice for $20 a head. The trek itself was not the Jack London-esque traverse of snowy evergreen forests and hills we'd imagined, but rather a racetrack loop on the ice no bigger than the dog track oval at Ebro.

And there was a line. P and I both hate lines.

But alas we endured, snapped a couple pics of us and ice and dogs,

and returned to the car so we could get the hell out of Lake Placid and try to salvage something fun.

We hit on the idea of driving to Burlington, Vermont, a bare forty miles to the east. Google maps assured it would take over two hours to get there, which I dismissed as underestimating my ability to make up time by defying the local speed laws.

Always believe what Google tells you when it comes to navigation. We made great time winding through hills, dairy farms, and Hallmark card towns that all seemed to have been founded in 1760-something. We crested the hill and were filled with hope as we saw Lake Champlain spread below us, deep blue and stretching to the northern horizon.

As we turned to drive north along the shore, Google told us to turn right, which channeled us into the driveway for the ferry just as it was pulling away. The nice girl in the ticket booth apologetically told us the ferry wouldn't return for an hour, and then it'd be another half hour to cross the lake. If she were in our shoes, she'd drive 45 minutes up to Plattsburgh and take the ferry across to Vermont .from there.

Suddenly feeling time-compressed, having made a dinner reservation in Saranac Lake at 7:30, we hurtled north toward Plattsburgh, then were approaching the sound barrier on the road to the Plattsburgh ferry when we passed a New York State Trooper, strategically positioned where the speed limit dropped to 35. We were exceeding that, somewhat.

The state of New York is the most over-policed I've ever seen. There are literally troopers every ten or fifteen miles along its interstates, and they crouch like coiled rattlers looking to help the governor with his spending problem.

So, inevitably, there were blue lights in the rearview, and soon a nice young man in a uniform featuring an absurd purple knit tie from the 1980s appeared at the window. He purported to feel sorry for us, and instead of a speeding ticket wrote us up for a non-moving violation, having a Taylor County dumping permit sticker in our back window. Seriously. Having a sticker in your back window is apparently illegal in the Empire State.

But our truck is registered in Florida. And literally every single pickup in New York has stickers all over the back window, trumpeting the driver's concern for gun rights or whatever.

Of course, we won't spend $500 lawyering up to point out the sheer absurdity of the situation to a local Plattsburgh judge, and the trooper knew that. You buy the ticket, you take the ride.

While I steamed sullenly over the ticket, Peg enjoyed a beautiful ferry ride across Lake Champlain to Vermont.

Once off the ferry, it took us nearly an hour to make the 25 miles or so to Burlington, a spotlessly clean city seemingly populated entirely with white hipsters wearing hemp sherpa hats and drinking lattes. The waterfront is surprisingly devoid of restaurants and watering holes, nothing like what we'd do in the south, but we finally found a deli/convenience store/restaurant where we could find an insipid glass of pino noir and admire the view before bounding back to Lake Placid.

We walked into the Interlaken two hours later, as the place was filling for supper, and adjourned to the bar for a cocktail because we had a few minutes before our dinner reservation in the next town. Brian seemed a little sheepish at our appearance.

"Did you talk to Mary?" he asked.

""We did. It's all good," I replied.

Except it wasn't. Around my second sip of Jameson's, the fireplug (apparently named Mary) reached around us to place menus on the bar. How nice? But we weren't planning on dining here, thanks. Then I noticed two older couples at her elbow, eyeing our barstools. It appeared Mary had overbooked the dining room, and elected to solve her math problem by displacing the two southerners at the bar so she could seat these folks for supper.

We were a little indignant, particularly given the events of the night before. Then she tossed a little gasoline on the smoldering ember of Peg's ridgerunner sense of right-and-wrong.

"I did offer to make you a reservation for dinner." As if that explained everything.

Now P was, as she would put it, can-throwing mad, as was I. We moved to a couple chairs by the fireplace and finished our drinks, P not-so-quietly articulating her displeasure every time our host walked by, trying to avoid eye-contact. I paid our tab, Brian apologized yet again for our nightmarish experience since arriving, and we left for supper in Saranac.

This ramble has been going on for a while, so I guess I'll save that story for tomorrow. It gets better. Trust me. How could it have gotten much worse?