Road Trip

Our daycare person had this past Thursday and Friday off, so it was my turn to stay home with Ally. A quick email to the Wife tells me that she's got nothing planned for this weekend. I decide I don't want to spend the weekend at home just hanging around so I hop on the internet and start searching. My mind is racing with possibilities...the Cape, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, the options seemed endless. A couple of quick searches on Expedia tells me everything I pretty much needed to know...that I'm a moron for thinking there's going to be an availability at any place remotely worth traveling to. Great. So I email this to my Wife listing the few options I had found. Literally 2 minutes later I get an agenda from what appears to be a licensed travel agent. It had points of interest, prices, times, hotels, directions, estimated arrival information, the works. I get this and immediately think to myself...evidently it's been too long since my Wife's last vacation.

So like the all great road trips we start in the planning/prepacking stage. We've laid out our route: West through Massachusetts to the New York boarder, continue West to Albany, then North to the great Adirondack mountains with stops in both Lake George and Lake Placid. The trip revolves around our ability to deal with two very important pieces of electronics, which are important for two different reasons. The first is a borrowed GPS unit to help us navigate the trip, and the second is a borrowed DVD player to keep Ally quiet while Mommy and Daddy try to get everyone to the vacation spot all still alive. Let's start with the GPS unit. It is fairly easy to use and works well...the scary part about the little unit is how dependent you quickly become on this thing. After as little as 1 hour on the road I am now completely relying on this little electronic gizmo to keep me going in the right direction. Once we get off the highway and a turn or two later and that's it, no matter how ridiculous it's directions are...I am now committed to following them.

Lake George is a wonderful area. We stopped at a children's park called Magic Forrest. It's a nice little park in the idea of Mountain Park, which is an old amusement park from the town I grew up in. Magic Forrest is also home to the nations last diving horse show. Now for those who aren't familiar with that term...it's basically a show where they have a horse run up this long ramp and then "jump" (okay it's more like fall/slide) into a 14 foot deep pool. In case you are wondering, the show is everything you're thinking...yup a horse falls into an above ground pool. It takes about 45 seconds tops. If you're ever in the area, you should definitely stop in and check it out. We walk up and down the strip checking out the numerous outlet stores, make a few purchases here and there. Then it's back to the hotel and Ally's favorite part of the vacation by far...the pool. This pool actually has a water slide too. Nice. Ally and I go down the slide a few times until a gaggle of preteens arrive and take over the pool area. How nice, some nice "responsible" parents brought all 29 of their children to the same hotel as ours and decide to let them descend on the pool all at the same time. Great. Now preteens don't really look out or wait for the 2 1/2 year old waddling by...so it's the end of pool time for us. Back to the room.

Pillows. Pillows were our downfall this night. We're talking no neck support, squishy, crappy, $2.50 freakin pillows. Everyone is allotted two pillows (Ally's sleeping in the bed w/ Mommy and Daddy). This does not work. Ally evidently likes to play Twister while she sleeps. Right foot Daddy's groin, Left hand Mommy's face...you get the point? Let's just say she quite the "active" sleeper. So between the trying to find a comfortable spot to sleep and trying to defend myself from Ty-Kwon-Do Ally I find little sleep this night. But alas we all go to bed before 8 so getting up at 6:30 was no big deal.

Natural cave and bridge trip. This is our first trip of day 2, heading towards Lake Placid (home of the 1932 and 1980 Winter Olympics). The cave/bridge attraction is a good one. First of all, at $22 total for the family, it's an economical trip. It was also a great little bit of exercise, it was about 2 hours of fairly intense hiking over a "trail" looking at a nice gorge and into some smaller caves. The problem we ran into is our daughter is: crazy, independent, and currently in the middle of a HUGE defiant streak. This is a GREAT combination of attitudes to bring a 2 1/2 year old over a bunch of cliffs and very narrow passes all made of rock and loose stone. Needless to say...great levels of both caution and patience were required in order for everyone to make it out alive.

Lake Placid. Beautiful. Peaceful. This is where we should have came straight away. The lake is great, the Olympic stadium cool (some how I still hear Al Michaels "Do you believe in miracles?"), the shops are neat and the people are generally nice. So here I am sitting in the Golden Arrow Hotel and resort bringing you this blog entry. There's more to this trip (like the Asian fellow trying to throw my daughter into a gorge at the cave attraction) but I won't bore you with ALL of the details just yet. Tomorrow (hopefully) we'll check out the ski jumps (140+ feet high) from the 1980 Olympics, then it's either on our way back south or we'll try going across a ferry into northern Vermont. Either way we should find a few other fun things to share.

Until next time...thanks for checking.

- J