New York - Day 25

Cumberland Bay State Park

Friday, 25 May 2018

The last 2 mornings I walked with the dogs down to the boat launch at the Hudson River they have in that state park.  Yesterday morning I saw a pair of Canada Geese; today I saw the same pair but this time with at least 4 goslings.  It was great to see the nice little family.

Near there, the park has a sign that says the Hudson has been known for centuries as a river that’s not in much of a hurry to get anywhere.  This end is a tidal estuary ending in a dam upriver at Troy, which is 150 miles from the Atlantic Ocean.  If you drop a stick into the river at the dam, it’ll take 126 days to drift the down the river to the sea, which is pretty slow-moving, all right.

TV stations in this part of the state include weather for Vermont and Massachusetts, as we’re closer to those states than to the Finger Lakes region.  All day I was picking up a Vermont public radio station.

today's route

I left the main highway at Lake George to travel part-way around the lake.  I’d heard it’s a lovely area and a pretty drive, and both are true.  But for a vehicle like mine it’s a little claustrophobic because the road winds around in sharp bends and narrow lanes and no shoulders and lots of trees - it’s in the Adirondack Park – and dozens of camps and cabins for rent.

I was briefly accompanied by a Pileated Woodpecker.  He was probably trying to fly across the road just as I drove by and swerved to avoid me and kept on flying in my direction until

Pileated woodpecker

he veered back the way he’d come from.  That’s why I got a good enough look at him to figure out what he was.  It was great because we don’t seem to get anything that big with so much red on its head where I’ve been living.

I finally decided to go back to the main highway, which had its own share of beauty because almost the whole rest of the way up here I was in park boundaries.  The highway goes through what I think are probably the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains.

I saw kayaks strapped to cars all the way up.  If they’re all going to the same place, it’s going to be a traffic jam on the water.

As I got farther north, I started to see highway signs in French as well as English. Sortie, for instance, at an exit, or hébergement to indicate lodging ahead.  I deduced that I was getting closer to the Canadian border, borne out when I saw a highway sign saying it was 64 miles to Montreal.

This campground is on a bay of Lake Champlain.  I had intended to stay the night in an Albany parking lot (hard to find a reservation on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend) but when I called this park, where I have reservations for Saturday and Sunday, they said I could have a non-electric site on a first-come-first-served basis.  I decided I might be safer there than in a miscellaneous place in a city on a national holiday weekend so came on up.

I had a lot of very strong and gusty wind on the highway, and that continued in the campground.  But much easier to take if I’m not having to steer.  Several license plates here are from Québec and a family with 4 young kids across from me are speaking French.