2016/08 Newf'land trip - Catskills |
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Saturday August 27th
We had breakfast in Maine, coffee in New Hampshire, lunch in Vermont, and dinner in New York State. It was a long driving day with a few quilt and shopping stops.
We were heading west across Maine through forest, increasingly hillier as we passed into New Hampshire, and then the Green Mountains of Vermont. The green was on the verge of changing, with a few splashes of red and gold, but we were a month too early for the spectacular fall colours of the sugar maples.
Sandie had two quilt shops in New Hampshire, both on strip malls in Concord, easy to find. The two in Vermont were in pretty touristy towns on Highway 9, easy to find if not to park.
New York State was more of a challenge with the big cities of Troy, Albany, and Schenectady to negotiate. We drove along this street to the quilt shop in Troy. All the buildings were large homes with double decker porches; the overall effect struck me as quite ugly. I took a second look on Google Earth and found this – yes, ugly.
I was more familiar with Albany, New York State’s capital city. I traveled there for the state’s social security system. They reckoned they’d saved the cost of our computer system in the first year; before that every county had its own system and the villains would have an address in each county and collect welfare payments in all of them.
We crossed the Hudson River, already enormous, on its way to New York City and the Atlantic. The quilt shop in Schenectady had closed minutes before we arrived. I went next door to the liquor store and found that I could buy wine and rum but not beer. I’d have to buy beer at a “beverage store” or a supermarket. We went to a Walmart in Albany, a very large store but we couldn’t find the food section until we realized that there was another enormous floor downstairs. As well as escalators for people there were others to carry shopping carts between the two floors. I’ve since discovered that this is actually the largest Walmart in the world, over a quarter million square feet. And it was busy! With supersized people! We felt embarrassed to be only filling one basket.
We were heading south on a freeway towards a campground in the Catskills. New York State has texting stops along its freeways, places where you can stop and use your phone. We don’t know if this makes the freeways safer or just makes it easier to prosecute offenders who text on the freeway itself.
The Catskills park is a beautiful place with forests, craggy mountains, rocky cliffs, and waterfalls. And people and cars everywhere. The park is only a hundred miles from New York City and this was a Saturday. It was also the last weekend of the summer before school started and both campgrounds we tried were full. We were thinking of heading for a Walmart parking lot, the ultimate defeat, when Sandie spotted a large parking area in Phoenicia. It had no signs forbidding camping so that’s where we spent the night. It wasn’t very restful as cars came in and drove past us in the middle of the night but it was better than Walmart.
Sunday August 28th
We were off really early intending to take a look at the park before the crowds woke up, and to stop for breakfast with a sunny view. But we were soon in fog and couldn’t see much more than the road. Eventually, we stopped at Palmer’s Hill and watched the fog moving over the distant hills and lakes.