Okay, I admit I was just trying to come up with a catchy name for a sequel to yesterday's post, and thought of the most famous sequel of all time, except maybe Godfather II, and I couldn't figure out how to work that one into a fitting title.
Today we return to Sunday morning and the cool, misty shorelines of Alexandria Bay, knowing we'll be driving home to Corning later. I planned a meander down two lane roads, rather than taking the mostly interstate highway route that brought us up here.
But first, breakfast and a cup of really wonderful coffee at Cathy's, a three table cafe and the only thing open in Alex City at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning.
We actually ate breakfast there both mornings we were in town. Each time, Fox News was blaring from a TV mounted right over our heads, and the eponymous Cathy told a story at the next table about taking her grandson to a Trump rally. Yikes. Her boyfriend is the chef in the back, who doesn't say much but whips up the finest (okay, let's face it, "only") omelettes and quiche you'll find in the Thousand Islands. This particular morning, a group from Idaho showed up, and we ceded our four person table to them for the two holer next to the window. Afterward we learned that they had quietly bought our breakfast in gratitude. Nice to know there's still a little kindness out there.
Bloated with eggs and toast and ready for a nap, we instead went back and packed up our belongings in the seminarian's cell, said goodbye to the heart-shaped jacuzzi tub, and started south toward home. We wound through beautiful farm country on mostly deserted two-lane roads, passing through the ugly cinder block brownness of Fort Drum, home of the 10th Mountain Division. I think we found the folks who helped design our hotel room.
From here, it's going to be mostly stock photos borrowed from the internet because I was driving and P wasn't particularly active with her camera that day.
The stretch from Fort Drum to Rome is Mennonite country, with spotless farms and barns filled with Holsteins (P had to tell me what they were, in truth. Otherwise, it would've been simply "black and white cows"). And they really do ride around in those buggies, clogging up traffic as we got closer to town.
There were also ridgelines covered in windmills. You could almost hear the sound of birds being ground into guacamole. Actually, no you could not.
Eventually we found our way to Rome, the unlovely former home of Griffiss Air Force Base. The northern neighborhoods there were a lot like Corning, with well-kept Victorians and huge elms and maples just beginning to shed their leaves. It got progressively dodgier as we approached downtown, however.
Perhaps the weirdest stop on the trip was just a couple miles south of Rome, at the Erie Canal Village. The former tourist attraction was largely abandoned, with a rotting keelboat moored along the bank of a damp ditch that was once part of the canal that stretched from the Hudson to Buffalo.
There were crumbling buildings, a closed up ticket office, and on the other side what appeared to be a working farm with livestock in one of the old timey buildings. We took a couple pictures and left.
Throughout the day, one thing that struck us was the proliferation of MAGA stuff along the sides of the roads in the country.
With Biden up by 32 points in New York as I type this, it's easy to forget that Trump won 45 of New York's counties in 2016. Those folks are clearly still out here.
After riding through Oneida, NY, a cool, red brick town that is still the headquarters of the company that makes Oneida china, we made our way into Hamilton, the home of Colgate University, alma mater of my old friend and Panama City's former mayor, Gerry Clemons.
The place is nothing short of spectacular, and P and I pondered what would've happened if we had received the sort of advice in high school that included options like this, instead of the university down the road for both of us. We agreed we would have loved to attend a small liberal arts school like this, but never really saw it as an option.
This led to a wine stop to wash away the melancholy at a local sports bar, where I watched the Cowboys stink it up over P's shoulder while she continued to look lovely, as always.
And no, I do not see myself as sexist or objectifying women by making that observation. P's always just lovely, and a great traveling companion. She's also perennially assertive, as in the moment right after I snapped this shot, when she sent back the wine because the bottle had clearly been open since perhaps Obama's second term. I was willing to hold my breath and make the best of it. Instead, the bartender brought fresh glasses along with an apology. Problem solved.
From Hamilton we drove south through one cool small town after another, with storefronts that were not boarded up, and no trash along the sides of the thoroughfares leading to their courthouse squares. Things truly are different up here.
I was particularly charmed by Norwich,
which is just north of Binghamton, a far less lovely place and the spot where we rejoined the interstate and civilization for a drive along rivers and past a casino or two on our way back to Corning and real life.
This still feels like a foreign country to me, like I am an alien trying to pass myself off as a harmless local as we survey the countryside. Part of the problem is that one doesn't get much of a feel for life in another culture by viewing it out of a car window at 60 miles an hour. Understanding takes time, and the best we can offer is a high speed pass through their lives without really talking to anyone or abiding in one spot long enough to get a longer view.
Then again, abiding doesn't mean acclimating, either. We are coming up on a month here, and I have to admit I don't know a single person in Corning, besides a nice couple we met out on the boat a couple weeks ago. I sometimes feel like I know my neighbors from watching their lives outside my window while I work up here in the solarium--there is the earnest, athletic lady across the street with her Subaru and wardrobe of exercise clothes that suggests a life of leisure; the stooped old widow across the way who hires a team of Hispanic men to blow the leaves off her lawn every other day; the nice couple next door with their cute kids and great jobs at Corning, Inc. And yet, I don't really know any of them. Maybe it's the pandemic. Maybe it's just life in the digital age, where our "friends" are the 729 people we've friended on Facebook, and we have our most meaningful conversations talking to ourselves on a blog.
I've got to get out more. I didn't feel that way when I had chickens, guineas, geese, and ducks running around outside the office window. That's probably an observation for a therapy group.
But there likely won't be any "getting out" today, yet another one filled with drizzle that's forecast to turn to snow tonight. And so it goes.
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