The Adirondacks

Well, the Adirondacks were something of a disappointment – not because the landscape is not magnificent; it is. The mountains wear a nubby coverlet of green, but near the highway, huge shards of sheer black rock are exposed, revealing the prehistoric beginnings of the Adirondacks. I’m always delighted when I see boulders erupting from the earth, rocky cliffs and craggy terrain. I’m not sure where this interest comes from, or why I love rocks so much. . . . Maybe it’s that they seem to offer to reveal secrets about the earth’s history – if I only knew how to read them. I should have been a geologist, apparently . . . . As it is, I have a collection of rocks (my artifacts, I call them – along with the leaves, flowers, seeds and other bits of nature I gather along the way) from all around the world, chosen simply because I like the way they look, for their colors, shapes (I have a collection of heart-shaped rocks), composition and size. I’ve been collecting rocks for some 20 years or more; baskets and bins of them are stored in the garage and living room of our home in Bellingham. I’ll have a whole new assortment of stones, pebbles and rocks to add when we’ve finished this journey. Meanwhile, Steve claims that the weight of my rocks in the motorhome increases our fuel consumption by at least 10%. He exaggerates, of course.

Anyway – the Adirondacks are disappointing because it rains lightly but steadily for the 2 days we are here. On Monday, we putter around in the RV waiting for the rain to let up. Finally Steve says he’s tired of being cooped up and is going to drive to Lake Placid, about 30 miles away, just to get out. I volunteer to go with him. Lake Placid, high in the mountains, was the site of the 1964 and 1980 Winter Olympics. It’s a typical ski resort community with the exception that it has huge venues for speed skating, figure skating and other Olympic sports. And like most post-Olympic venues, they look a little sad and seedy – after all, there’s not a lot of demand for arenas that seat thousands of people in a village that typically is populated by only a few thousand people (or fewer). The figure skating venue is still used for world figure skating events, but otherwise, it appears that the Olympic buildings have seen their last hurrah.