New York - Day 28 - Lake Placid

Lake Placid/Whiteface Mountain KOA
Monday, 28 May 2018

today's route

The drive from one campground to another was just a little more than an hour, so I decided to take a detour down to Lake Placid and Saranac Lake first.  The turnoff to the top of Whiteface Mountain was on the way to the campground, but the peak is at 4,865' and I wasn't convinced I could get up even part of that so passed it by.  The mountain itself was pretty hard to miss, though.  It seemed wooded all the way to the top, thought that may have just been my point of view.  This photo isn't mine, unfortunately, because the mountain was too close for me to get any kind of angle on it.

Whiteface Mountain

Lake Placid (the town) was in full-on tourist mode.  Of course, because it's Memorial Day there may have been quite a few more visitors than usual, but they packed the place.  I was thinking about shopping for a t-shirt and walking the dogs but couldn't find anywhere at all to park.  Adding to all that was some kind of situation that required what were probably all the emergency vehicles in the entire area with a main section of streets being shut off.  I had to figure out a detour and ended up just following some of the locals and hoping they'd go somewhere I wanted to go.  As a result, I've now seen the high school from the back and several neighborhoods.  Seems to be a nice town.

We drove on to Saranac Lake, the complete opposite of Lake Placid.  Saranac Lake (the town) is a very small, undeveloped town sitting at the base of Lower Saranac Lake (the lake), not to be confused with Upper Saranac Lake (somewhat larger).  Very quiet town, apparently, even on Memorial Day.

It was my understanding that Olympic events and housing happened here as well as at Lake Placid, but if that's true, you'd never know it now.  Lake Placid has a big sign saying they hosted the Olympics both in 1932 and in 1980.  The "miracle on ice" hockey game with the US beating the USSR happened at the 1980 games.  Lake Placid also has a huge building with Olympic symbols outside that I think is an Olympic museum, though I couldn't stop to check because of the aforesaid traffic problem.

We drove on back to the campground, and I'll say right now that this is hands down the nicest KOA I've been to.  It's absolutely enormous but, thank goodness, we got there on what was probably the slowest day of the year: everybody had already left because the 3-day weekend was ending.  As a result, it was very quiet and very few dogs to match the very few people.  Plus the place is laid out well and there are several nature trails for the dogs.

There were also massive numbers of chipmunks, driving Dexter crazy.  There's also a resident Downy Woodpecker.  Nice place.