Final summer vacation in the Finger Lakes

This year I am planning my final summer vacation in the Finger Lakes, starting early a week from Friday.  As I like to say, “it’s fine”. I guess it’s better then staying home but I am also incredibly tired and bored with the Finger Lakes and so many of the trips I take lately, as in recent years I could basically just cover up the years on calendar and not know the difference, a rinse and repeat of every year.

Next summer, I am planning a vacation out to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Northern Wisconsin. I need to find some green pastures, I am so incredibly bored so many things in my life but I am not ready to take a 14-year old increasingly creaky truck on an eight hour drive for multiple days, loaded down with gear, merging in an out of heavy traffic. Then hours and hours of pounding the rusty old suspension and worn out ball joints on remote rural dirt roads in forests of Michigan seem. Plus I am only just starting to study maps, consider potential destinations and places to camp in the back country.

But in the mean-time what to do this summer vacation? Just because base camp will be in the National Forest – most likely either Potomac Road or Chicken Co-op, doesn’t predisposed me to any one vacation plan. Even if the base camp is same as the past 15 years – for one last time – I still want to find something of value beyond laying around at the Watkins Glen Pool reading about off-grid solar and cabins and pig raising. Or laying back in the hammock, listening to cows moo and rip the grass. There has to be views I’ve not explored, I do want to poke around Elmira and maybe Corning. I want to hit destinations not done before, so the trip is memorable even if it is similar to many before.

I’m ready though for bigger and better places. I hate New York, I want to get out and further and further away as I know there are other places in this world that much more share my values, are interesting and not so overwhelmed by the love of plastic and wokeness.