Tag: Lake Placid

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Cross Country Slackers

Bob sled painting at the Lake View Motel in Lake Placid, New York
Bob sled painting at the Lake View Motel in Lake Placid, New York

Would love to be in San Francisco for the opening of the Luc Tuymans show. They showed a few luscious paintings of his (one of a gas chamber) in a review in Sunday’s Times. But I’m not complaining. We have wifi access at the Lake Side Motel in Lake Placid New York and the Saints are winning. Kind of funny that the town of Lake Placid is not on Lake Placid. It’s on Mirror Lake. Lake Placid, the lake, is next door. The Olympics were held here in 1980 and some members of the US team are training here now. It’s fourteen degrees outside and they have real snow here unlike Vancouver.

We skied in the woods for a while this afternoon and then skied out on Mirror Lake at sunset before settling in at the bar for a local brew and the pregame show. Every other vehicle on the way up here was towing a trailer with a couple of sleds and we spotted snowmobiles darting across the road everywhere. If snowmobiling is a sport it has to be the most popular one up here. We had dinner with a bunch of Canadians downhill skiers. They kept slipping into French so we couldn’t understand what they were saying. They are going to be out on the slopes at 8 in the morning. They made us cross country skiers feel like slackers.

Our motel overlooks the lake and has some pretty cool artwork in the halls (above). We plan to head over to Pete and Shelley‘s neck of the woods tomorrow where we’ll celebrate a significant birthday for Peggi.

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Just Bead It

Northway Motel
Northway Motel

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.

Pete and Shelley House
Pete and Shelley House

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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