Buffalo and 1000 Islands, NY
Princess has an appointment today at 3:15 p.m. for her weekly blood test. We decide to go to Buffalo, about 45 minutes away from where we’re staying. There are several art museums, Teddy Roosevelt’s inaugural home, a transportation museum, city parks designed by Frederick Olmstead (who designed Central Park), and Buffalo is known for its architecture.
The route we take into downtown Buffalo offers an inauspicious first impression. We pass block after block of boarded-up stores and businesses colorfully embellished with spray paint graffiti, and enough For Rent/For Sale signs to open a commercial real estate office. Once a wealthy industrial city where manufacturing and steel plants thrived and unions called the shots, Buffalo shows little sign of the resurgence of growth and prosperity we’ve read about.
When we walk the downtown streets, we see more signs of life; nevertheless, this is not a vibrant, energetic city. Every third building is vacant; where there are tenants, they have apparently lost the will to care whether customers come or not. The windows are grimy, displays are lifeless and signage is peeling and faded. It is disheartening, because the architecture of downtown Buffalo – especially construction from the early 1900s - is outstanding, even uplifting at times. The architects – Louis Sullivan, Joseph Ellicott, E.B. Green, Richard Upjohn, and others, designed buildings that respect and pay homage to the city’s heart and history. My favorite is the Guaranty Building designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, and built in 1896 for $550,000. Sullivan was an early mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright, and this building has clean, functional lines despite an ornate but elegant vegetation motif covering the 13-story façade. It’s unfortunate that these beautiful churches, banks, hotels and government buildings must share street space with 60’s era steel and glass structures that have neither art nor soul.
We decide to go to the Broadway Market, the oldest public market in the U.S. We walk into this enclosed marketplace and almost leave immediately – it’s clear that it’s hanging on by the grace of a lenient landlord. But we walk past the shuttered and empty booths and barely-there survivors – a bakery, a fake-oriental-rug seller, and as we walk past a produce counter, I spy baby new potatoes for 50 cents a pound. And tomatoes, shiny red and luscious. Beets. New York-grown apples. Corn on the cob. We buy several pounds of each. As we pay for our purchases, I notice homemade pickles in a jar on the counter, 3 for $1, and I say to Steve, “You like pickles, don’t you? Want to get one? Oh what the heck, let’s get three.” The proprietor, whose accent gives away his Eastern European heritage, says, “I have fresh homemade sauerkraut too, if you want.” We do want; we buy a pound for $1. Then I ask him where we can get good sausage to go with the sauerkraut, and he directs us to Luna’s, the butcher shop at the other end of the market. We decide we’ll come back for it when we’re ready to leave town, since we don’t have any way to refrigerate it.
We spend another hour or so driving around Buffalo, gawking at the vintage turn-of-the-century mansions (now mostly office buildings) on Delaware Avenue, admiring the well-kept Victorian and Arts-and-Crafts homes near Delaware Park, . We discover that one of the museums I want to see, specializing in African-American and Latin American art, is closed, its walls and windows bare. Another specializing in photography has just taken down its exhibit, so I’m out of luck there too. By this time, it’s too late to go to the Botanical Garden, the Pierce Arrow Transportation Museum, or the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Martin house, so we head back to Broadway Market where I buy 1.5 pounds of Polish sausage and 2 pounds of Italian sausage. For dinner, we have home made sauerkraut, pumpernickel bread, boiled baby new potatoes and the best Polish sausage we’ve ever eaten – so fresh, fat-free and meaty I could kick myself for not buying another 2 or 3 pounds. Fortunately, we’ve still got another ¾ pound of links to enjoy another night.
Tomorrow we will leave the Buffalo area. Right now we don’t know where we are headed for. We’ll decide in the morning or when we get on the road. We’re going westward, that much we know. I think.
Meanwhile, we call the vet and get Princess’ blood test results. Her white count has improved but it’s still low, so she must continue on the antibiotic. We’ll get the prescription filled at Wal-Mart tomorrow.
She has good days and bad days. Some days she looks like someone spiked her dogfood with 90 proof whiskey – she sways on her feet like a 2 a.m. drunk departing the bar after last call. When she sits, her back legs slide from beneath her; she finally has to give up and lay down, since that’s where she’ll end up anyway. When we take her for a walk, she’s panting and wheezing after 4 or 5 yards. But occasionally, she’s her old feisty self, wanting to play tug of war with her blanket, prancing (briefly) until she realizes she doesn’t have the stamina to continue.
I confess that we are spoiling her. She’s enormously thirsty all the time and constantly hungry – so much so that she even eats foods she formerly wouldn’t touch, like baby carrots (I dropped one on the floor tonight while making dinner and was amazed to see her scarf it up. I gave her 2 more and she crunched them ravenously),. We limit her dog food to one cup a day, and she still gets only 1 dog biscuit a day (her favorite – peanut butter or molasses flavor from Trader Joe’s). But we will slip her a bite or two from our plate at dinner, and tonight I let her lick the empty pint ice cream carton even though it was chocolate. I figure she’s not going to die from overweight, nor from eating a lick of chocolate or a bowl of vanilla.
Wednesday, June 15
We are NOT heading west; we are going back toward the Thousand Islands of New York. Other travelers tell us it’s a beautiful area, worth spending time in. So why not? The only scheduled appointment we have is August 3; my sister, Maggie, and her husband Michael are flying in to Kalispell, Montana to join us for 5 days at Glacier National Park. So we drive 200 miles to Henderson Harbor. The RV Park we’re staying at looks and sounds impressive in the description and the brochure – new park, lakefront sites, all sorts of amenities, wi-fi, blah blah blah. But like too many places we’ve stayed, this place overpromises and under-delivers. It IS a beautiful location – the tip of a land spit surrounded by Lake Ontario, but this place is not new, it’s 2 years old, and looks every bit of it. The wi-fi works only in the office, and there’s a steep hourly fee to use it.
Worst of all, we are being attacked by apparently vengeful gnats and mosquitos. They cover the motor home, swarm in and around the Jeep. We make the mistake of opening the door to go out, and now they are flying everywhere inside the RV – on the TV screen, on and around the lights . . . I start swatting right and left, killing bugs with no remorse. We turn the lights off to limit their dispersion. I spray myself with Off! since bugs seem to like my skin or my scent. After swatting every visible insect, I get a wet cloth and start cleaning up bug juice on walls, furniture and ceiling, then vaccuum the corpses from the floor. When morning comes, we pack up, leaving the park and its killer bugs behind.
We drive an hour to Wellesley Island, arriving in the early afternoon. We drive around on the small island, look for a grocery store to buy milk and eggs – there are none, only convenience stores. We go for a hike at the state park, and return around 6 p.m. The sky is overcast and has been spitting all afternoon – not a promising sign for tomorrow. Oh well.
I don’t feel like making dinner, and put it off till 8 p.m., then take boneless chicken breasts out of the freezer, defrost them and brown them in butter and olive oil along with sliced onions, then simmer the chicken for an hour in a sauce made with canned mushrooms, frozen artichoke hearts, white wine and chicken stock seasoned with tarragon, thyme, salt and pepper and brown mustard. Served with baby new potatoes and whole green beans, it’s a pretty tasty dish – and we have leftovers so I won’t have to cook some evening when I really don’t feel like it!
The route we take into downtown Buffalo offers an inauspicious first impression. We pass block after block of boarded-up stores and businesses colorfully embellished with spray paint graffiti, and enough For Rent/For Sale signs to open a commercial real estate office. Once a wealthy industrial city where manufacturing and steel plants thrived and unions called the shots, Buffalo shows little sign of the resurgence of growth and prosperity we’ve read about.
When we walk the downtown streets, we see more signs of life; nevertheless, this is not a vibrant, energetic city. Every third building is vacant; where there are tenants, they have apparently lost the will to care whether customers come or not. The windows are grimy, displays are lifeless and signage is peeling and faded. It is disheartening, because the architecture of downtown Buffalo – especially construction from the early 1900s - is outstanding, even uplifting at times. The architects – Louis Sullivan, Joseph Ellicott, E.B. Green, Richard Upjohn, and others, designed buildings that respect and pay homage to the city’s heart and history. My favorite is the Guaranty Building designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, and built in 1896 for $550,000. Sullivan was an early mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright, and this building has clean, functional lines despite an ornate but elegant vegetation motif covering the 13-story façade. It’s unfortunate that these beautiful churches, banks, hotels and government buildings must share street space with 60’s era steel and glass structures that have neither art nor soul.
We decide to go to the Broadway Market, the oldest public market in the U.S. We walk into this enclosed marketplace and almost leave immediately – it’s clear that it’s hanging on by the grace of a lenient landlord. But we walk past the shuttered and empty booths and barely-there survivors – a bakery, a fake-oriental-rug seller, and as we walk past a produce counter, I spy baby new potatoes for 50 cents a pound. And tomatoes, shiny red and luscious. Beets. New York-grown apples. Corn on the cob. We buy several pounds of each. As we pay for our purchases, I notice homemade pickles in a jar on the counter, 3 for $1, and I say to Steve, “You like pickles, don’t you? Want to get one? Oh what the heck, let’s get three.” The proprietor, whose accent gives away his Eastern European heritage, says, “I have fresh homemade sauerkraut too, if you want.” We do want; we buy a pound for $1. Then I ask him where we can get good sausage to go with the sauerkraut, and he directs us to Luna’s, the butcher shop at the other end of the market. We decide we’ll come back for it when we’re ready to leave town, since we don’t have any way to refrigerate it.
We spend another hour or so driving around Buffalo, gawking at the vintage turn-of-the-century mansions (now mostly office buildings) on Delaware Avenue, admiring the well-kept Victorian and Arts-and-Crafts homes near Delaware Park, . We discover that one of the museums I want to see, specializing in African-American and Latin American art, is closed, its walls and windows bare. Another specializing in photography has just taken down its exhibit, so I’m out of luck there too. By this time, it’s too late to go to the Botanical Garden, the Pierce Arrow Transportation Museum, or the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Martin house, so we head back to Broadway Market where I buy 1.5 pounds of Polish sausage and 2 pounds of Italian sausage. For dinner, we have home made sauerkraut, pumpernickel bread, boiled baby new potatoes and the best Polish sausage we’ve ever eaten – so fresh, fat-free and meaty I could kick myself for not buying another 2 or 3 pounds. Fortunately, we’ve still got another ¾ pound of links to enjoy another night.
Tomorrow we will leave the Buffalo area. Right now we don’t know where we are headed for. We’ll decide in the morning or when we get on the road. We’re going westward, that much we know. I think.
Meanwhile, we call the vet and get Princess’ blood test results. Her white count has improved but it’s still low, so she must continue on the antibiotic. We’ll get the prescription filled at Wal-Mart tomorrow.
She has good days and bad days. Some days she looks like someone spiked her dogfood with 90 proof whiskey – she sways on her feet like a 2 a.m. drunk departing the bar after last call. When she sits, her back legs slide from beneath her; she finally has to give up and lay down, since that’s where she’ll end up anyway. When we take her for a walk, she’s panting and wheezing after 4 or 5 yards. But occasionally, she’s her old feisty self, wanting to play tug of war with her blanket, prancing (briefly) until she realizes she doesn’t have the stamina to continue.
I confess that we are spoiling her. She’s enormously thirsty all the time and constantly hungry – so much so that she even eats foods she formerly wouldn’t touch, like baby carrots (I dropped one on the floor tonight while making dinner and was amazed to see her scarf it up. I gave her 2 more and she crunched them ravenously),. We limit her dog food to one cup a day, and she still gets only 1 dog biscuit a day (her favorite – peanut butter or molasses flavor from Trader Joe’s). But we will slip her a bite or two from our plate at dinner, and tonight I let her lick the empty pint ice cream carton even though it was chocolate. I figure she’s not going to die from overweight, nor from eating a lick of chocolate or a bowl of vanilla.
Wednesday, June 15
We are NOT heading west; we are going back toward the Thousand Islands of New York. Other travelers tell us it’s a beautiful area, worth spending time in. So why not? The only scheduled appointment we have is August 3; my sister, Maggie, and her husband Michael are flying in to Kalispell, Montana to join us for 5 days at Glacier National Park. So we drive 200 miles to Henderson Harbor. The RV Park we’re staying at looks and sounds impressive in the description and the brochure – new park, lakefront sites, all sorts of amenities, wi-fi, blah blah blah. But like too many places we’ve stayed, this place overpromises and under-delivers. It IS a beautiful location – the tip of a land spit surrounded by Lake Ontario, but this place is not new, it’s 2 years old, and looks every bit of it. The wi-fi works only in the office, and there’s a steep hourly fee to use it.
Worst of all, we are being attacked by apparently vengeful gnats and mosquitos. They cover the motor home, swarm in and around the Jeep. We make the mistake of opening the door to go out, and now they are flying everywhere inside the RV – on the TV screen, on and around the lights . . . I start swatting right and left, killing bugs with no remorse. We turn the lights off to limit their dispersion. I spray myself with Off! since bugs seem to like my skin or my scent. After swatting every visible insect, I get a wet cloth and start cleaning up bug juice on walls, furniture and ceiling, then vaccuum the corpses from the floor. When morning comes, we pack up, leaving the park and its killer bugs behind.
We drive an hour to Wellesley Island, arriving in the early afternoon. We drive around on the small island, look for a grocery store to buy milk and eggs – there are none, only convenience stores. We go for a hike at the state park, and return around 6 p.m. The sky is overcast and has been spitting all afternoon – not a promising sign for tomorrow. Oh well.
I don’t feel like making dinner, and put it off till 8 p.m., then take boneless chicken breasts out of the freezer, defrost them and brown them in butter and olive oil along with sliced onions, then simmer the chicken for an hour in a sauce made with canned mushrooms, frozen artichoke hearts, white wine and chicken stock seasoned with tarragon, thyme, salt and pepper and brown mustard. Served with baby new potatoes and whole green beans, it’s a pretty tasty dish – and we have leftovers so I won’t have to cook some evening when I really don’t feel like it!
posted by Anne-Marie | 9:41 AM
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