We got a late start and left Rochester around noon on Peggi’s birthday. We stopped at Starbucks to pick up a paper and a woman backed into our car. We drove east to Syracuse and then up Route 81 to Watertown before turning right on Route 3. This road crosses the northern Adirondack Mountains and takes you by some of its highest peaks. There was about two feet of snow up here and the scenery was spectacular. We pulled into Lake Placid around sundown and found a motel at the eastern edge of town with reasonable rates and still within walking distance of town.
Lake Placid is a cute little town and they know it. The Winter Olympics were held here in 1980 and facilities for for all those wacky events are still standing. Canadian tour buses clog the streets. People walk around with their ski passes on. We had to wait for a seat at the Great Adirondack Steak & Seafood Restaurant and it was worth the wait. They brew their own beer so we had pint in the bar and watched a skiing show on their tubeless TV. We walked back to our motel behind three twenty year old underdressed girls who were smoking and laughing. We walked by shops with names like “Body & Sole”, “Cuppa Joe”, “Just Bead It”, “Pasta La Vista” and “Bowlwinkles”. We curled up in our room with our library books, Stephen King’s “Duma Key” and a book on Arthur Dove.
We drove on to Pete and Shelley’s in the morning and went out skiing as soon as we got there. There were beaver tracks in the snow as we crossed the frozen marsh behind their house and headed up into the woods. It was absolutely beautiful. I wasn’t worried about freezing up here but I was worried about our new laptop freezing, so I didn’t bring it. We sat around the fire, talked, drank a bottle of their homemade dandelion wine and slept like babies.
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