Sunny, mostly clearand cool with the breeze and temperatures in the sixties. I’m in no rush for anything this morning, no solid plans for today besides going to Watkins Glen midday to get supplies.
Yesterday turned out to be a nice day ☀️ though a lot hotter and humid then expected but I enjoyed just walking 🚶 around the National Forest and exploring. This year I really don’t have the urge to go out and rush around to see everything, indeed in years past I feel like I’ve seen most of the most interesting things in the area – plus there is still eight days left.
I discovered why the bike 🚲 tire wasn’t holding air. 🚲 Valve stem was cracked, all the fix a flat in the world can’t fix that. I put the spare tube on and checking the spokes and found I broke one either riding trail or more likely riding home with the soft but not flat tire. AI’m figuring I’ll ride the bike a bit and while I didn’t pack extra spokes or the torx 25 key if I need to I can get the wheek fixed in Ithaca. I’ll pick up another spare tube at Walmart to be safe and toss the old tube in a village garbage can as I’m not going to burn rubber trash. 👃 And I have plenty of old tubes at home not full of tire slime.
I noticed it seems like the accessory battery 🔋 wasn’t charging well when the truck was running but I think it’s voltage drop on the gauge due to the neutral wire not having a good connection to the frame. Popped the hood and noticed the coolant was already a little bit below the full line despite topping it off before vacation. Things are tired 😫 and worn out on the truck. Fingers 🖕 crossed it makes it through summer vacation. At times there seems to be so much wrong with my increasingly worn out truck.
I have mixed feelings about taking it slow on vacation 🏖️ like I’m wasting my time reading 📖 and wandering pastures. I feel much too lazy just hanging out in the hammock drinking 🍻 and smoking all day. It’s not healthy! Still I want a slow paced summer vacation, I don’t want the stress of driving a long ways in my old truck, constantly racing the clock. I really do want to wile away the hours ⌛ without them disappearing too quickly. Labor Day and September will be here before you know it and I will have to head back home. 🏡 And then work.
I totally wanted to have a rip roaring fire 🔥 last night both because I knew it would be cold and wet and because I have a ton of camp garbage to burn up – a lot of wet garbage and plastics too from clam shells to corn cobs to the wrappers everything comes in. I haven’t had a fire since Thursday night because on the weekend night I got home late and last night it started pouring at 7 pm and continued well into the night 🛏️ after which I was snuggled up in my truck camper.
Twenty years ago there was many storms in my life, Hurricane Katarina was just another news story I was listening to in my 1998 Ford Ranger pickup truck I was driving back up to college in Plattsburgh after a weekend down with my family in Westerlo. Mostly I remember how pricey gas had gotten after the storm – as high as $2.20 or $2.30 a gallon in some of the off-the-beat gas stations – and how the news coverage was about how bad the President George Bush’s response was to the hurricane.
I made the drive between Westerlo and Plattsburgh many times in college. The vast Adirondack forest, rolling through the Northway in my pickup with the cowboy hat on the dashboard. First passing Lake George and the last 24 hour gas station, watching the miles tick upwards on mile marker along the highway then eventually reaching the High Peaks Exit then Four Mile Meadows, little more then a place of interest in my mind due to it’s name on map but for decades now just seen as a flat convient place to lay down miles of concrete and asphalt before reaching Lincoln Pond and the long drop to Lewis. Sometimes when I was trying to be frugal, I’d knock the truck out of over-drive and coast all the way to down Lewis. Then there that little hamlet the Northway roared through with that old house with burn barrel outback.
I honestly could not remember if Katarina was first or second semester as I was finishing up my college experience at Plattsburgh State during those two semesters, but it appears it was in 2005 so it would have been the first of two. The pungent smells of silage and manure reaching the fields near Adirondack Farms in Peru and then Apple Orchards. Soon to be at Plattsburgh, it’s just a flat roll down the road at this point. There was that mobile home with a burn barrel in Peru right along the Northway, they later started to get paid trash service that second semester I was at Plattsburgh State.
After getting kicked out of the University at Albany I am sure many people had my doubts I would ever go back to college or finish up my degree. But ultimately I did, even though I have to admit transferring in so much credit to Plattsburgh State and doing the internship meant that I barely got to know the school. But I did spend a lot of time on the backroads, though admitly finding good places to camp near college wasn’t as easy as you’d think. Plattsburgh advertises having a lot of connections to the Adirondack Park, but let’s be honest, it’s 30 miles outside of it and there isn’t as many places to roadside camp in that part of as other parts of the park.
Time always strikes me as a bit strange. I remember a few years back when the first batch of people born after September 11, 2001 became old enough to vote. Seemed werid, as I remember those days as a freshman at the Hudson Valley Community College when the planes hit. It was a similar time of seemingly unlimited options in my life, a peak time of growth, just like that time when I started at Plattsburgh State. It was good to get out and spend some time in a different part of state, a rural, agricultural area. Not just because I liked seeing the rundown homesteads with their stinky but then legal if frowned upon burn barrels. And their cattle and livestock. Rundown trailers, definately could find a lot of people just scraping together a life on those often rocky and denuded forest lands north of Dannemora and Altona. I joined as many clubs as possible of interest in college, the Plattsburgh Progressives, the Campus Democrats, Environmental Advocacy and Environmental Science Club. But being there only two fall semesters, and traveling back and forth to Albany, I spent relatively little time there.
In the end it wasn’t a bad time, though it’s also a chapter I’m sort of glad is closed in my life. Struggles never truly go away. It seems hard to believe that come Columbus Day I will have been with the NYS Assembly for 18 years, still in many ways trying to find direction with both excitement and challenges every day. It seems odd to think I probably don’t have 20 years left until retirement, that is from government work, until I actually build that off-grid homestead I want. Hoping to retire from government work age 55 or 60, then I can focus on the homestead and maybe other ventures. And two decades isn’t that long ago, as I can easily put my mind back into those college days both in the lecture hall, driving the Adirondack Northway and exploring the back country in my pickup.
Most of them from the early 1940s or 1950s. I’m really quite interested in post World War II sprawl and changes to highways as the modern motoring age came to be.
The nice thing about the old USGS maps is they are all geo referenced, so you can load them into the QGIS for quick comparison – and you can use any 1:24k index to quickly remove the collars. Plus they’re available for a lot more years – going back to the 1890s compared to the 1940s or 1950s for aerial photos.
They will make for interesting blog posts in the coming months and they are fascinating to look at and study the progression of cities over the years. I do want to try and find some contemporary maps in the same style for comparison – I was going to use the DOT topographic maps I have from the early 2000s from the CUGIR website or something made with OpenStreetMap data but I’d like to get something from USGS in a similar scale and design for better comparison. I’ll have to dig around tomorrow.
Wake and bake this morning, though doing both things lightly as I want to have a relaxed good day, wander around the woods, read a bit and hopefully not get too wet when the front comes through later today.
Warm and muggy today 😰 but that is expected to change for the balance of the week after the front comes through. Today is expected to be the last seventy degrees day up here on Hector’s Backbone through next weekend. It seems funny to think this is day five of vacation but NOAA forecasts only go out to next Saturday and I’m not leaving until a week from Monday on Labor Day. I’m wandering around by Potomac Ponds and some of the wildlife and mountain bike trails around there.
Its about taking it low and slow, 🐢 and enjoying the woods and nature 🪵🐸🐄 today and several other days of the week. Tomorrow I’ll go to Watkins Glen for supplies, maybe to float in Seneca Lake on the tube ⭕ if it’s not too cold and visit the Watkins Glen pool 🏊. Never got a fishing 🎣 pole or my licensed renewed I could do that too tomorrow. I tried topping off my bike 🚲 tire it’s not holding air well but I have a spare tube plus rubber patches to fix that. Maybe later today when I get back to camp.
Yesterday turned out to be a pretty amazing day 😀 once the skies got blue and my mind was cleared. Surprisingly hot and humid too. I’m glad I did the full Enfield Glen trail in Ithaca, it’s been years since I last done that. The swimming in Enfield Glen was so cold but the sun was hot ☀️ and I fell asleep on the beach. 🧴 Got a bottle of suntan lotion on Friday as I was pretty much out so I didn’t get burnt though at this point in the year the sun angle is lower end less likely to burn you. Then I went for a nice long paddle from the Alfred Treman boat launch, out on Cayuga Lake, up Falls Creek to where it comes too shallow and then the Cayuga Canal to under the bridges of the Octopus. .
Who knows how stormy the afternoon will be ⛈️ but my campsite is well drained for the most part and I’ll be back to camp before it gets bad out and can shelter either under the tarp or in the cap depending on the weather. 📚 Need to figure out what I want to read 📖 and relax. For the Love of Bacon didn’t have bacon 🥓 as they’ve not fired up the smoker since their farm vacation or at least bacon is curing so I got sausage which I’m gonna fry up with the kidney beans I cooked up before vacation and froze, along with summer squash.
I was at Robert Treman State Park by ten o’clock not because I was rushing but I wanted a good spot for my big jacked up truck before the crowds flocked to the swimming hole parking area when it opens at eleven. Plus the days go by so quickly even when I tell myself I am not to be rushed on vacation. How the hell I tell myself can it be the fourth day of vacation and only nine days left until it comes to its logical conclusion on Labor Day.
I cut back on the smoking and drinking 🚬 🍻 last night and just a cup of coffee ☕ yesterday and today and feeling better for it. Fried zucchini with onions was a much lighter meal 🍴 then the rather stinky beer boiled clams of earlier night, especially camping totally splattered with cow manure 💩 from riding through the paddies in that pasture that second day of camp. And now I’m just enjoying the beauty on this warm and sunny day. The blue skies and sun ☀️ filtering through the trees 🌳 are just such a mood booster.
I am hiking the gorge trail 🚶 around Enfield Glen, and will go swimming in the gorge swimming area that is on all the State Tourism Brochures 🏊 but usually is very cold and muddy. Then I’m thinking about checking out John’s Pond at Headwaters of the Buttermilk Creek which apparently not only has kayaking 🛶 but also a swimming beach. 🏖️ Maybe watch the sunset 🌇 from Cayuga Lake or maybe I’ll head back to camp 🏕️ early.
This morning I’ve been so fascinated by colors and ripples and everything else. 🌈 My GPS took me over the backroads from the National Forest to Enfield Glen and I couldn’t help but study the homesteads 🐐 and farms as I drove by. You see a lot of innovations and different things especially around the Ithaca area. A lot of overflowing dumpsters too and not burn barrels like Pennsylvania. 🛢️ I could have done the Pine Creek Gorge but being such a hot day today – and feeling unambitous – Enfield Glen seemed like the better alternative. The Pine Creek Gorge and that area around Ansonia certainly is different and quite a beautiful. It’s fun to see other states with other norms. Later in the week, maybe next weekend. 💭 I still have a lot of vacation left.
