One side-effect of our four nights in Saratoga Springs: we learned how much we liked — <em>needed</em> — extended stays in general (as opposed to two- and three-night blow-in/blow-out visits). So we started looking for Airbnb sorts of places near Saratoga Springs, even if we couldn’t stay in Saratoga Springs…

Nothing really that close, of course, so we widened our search. Lo and behold, a very interesting-sounding Airbnb place: an older home in a suburb of Schenectady, called Scotia — for a very reasonable weekly price!

We immediately contacted the host.

And then waited… and waited…

Finally she got back to us, the next day. Alas, she said, she would be unable to host us — because something had come up with another reservation, and she’d had to scramble to take care of her current guests, and she’d had to move one of those parties into the house we wanted, sorry sorry so very sorry—

Well, by then, we’d invested a certain amount of time in researching things to do in and near both Scotia and Schenectady. And we had almost no time left to look for longer-term lodging anyway. So we just checked around for plain old hotels, found a Comfort Inn in Scotia, and booked it… for three nights. Not ideal, but honestly there wasn’t that much we wanted to see nearby. We just wanted at that point to regroup, and plan a real extended, put-our-feet-up interlude somewhere.

Which we did. Oh, we had a few highlights right there in Scotia(ish):

• A family member’s family had once lived — but no longer lived — in a favorite home in Schenectady, and although it wasn’t delivered as a <em”>request, exactly, I could tell they sorta-kinda wouldn’t mind if I maybe took a photo or two…?
• On the way to that address, I stopped at a mall to see if I could get my watch battery replaced. (It’d stopped the day before.) Of course the mall — like many — was on its last legs, but a jeweler there did replace the battery. Unfortunately, they also set the weekday-and-date display just slightly wrong: it was 12 hours off-schedule. So ever since, every time the watch’s time creeps towards noon, the day of the week and the date also start to roll forward. I haven’t taken the time (haha) to fix it yet. It’s very confusing, though, when The Missus asks me what day it is and I look down at my wrist and then must asked myself, “Wait — is it actually daytime outside, or is it night? And thus do I just tell her what my watch says, or do I need to subtract a day?”
• After I left the mall, I headed into the heart of Schenectady. I had my new camera with me. It was raining quite a bit, off and on, but I figured I could at least take the pictures of the house from the curb, through an open car window. But as I headed that way, I kept glimpsing, in the sky, an enormous dark tower. A church…? But what the hell kind of church…?!? I realized I just had to photograph that, too. So I drove around, glancing skywards occasionally… and just as I arrived at the foot of it, promptly got lost in a maze of streets on which I couldn’t park at all. I didn’t get the photo — the one shown here was taken by the author of this fascinating blog post, titled “Schenectady’s Grotesque Grotesques.”.
• While discussing the family member’s house project, she told me the location was very close to a residential section of Schenectady called the “GE Plot.” (You can read about the GE Plot on Wikipedia.) The Missus and I did drive around that neighborhood while we were up there… took no pictures, but the houses and properties were indeed impressive!

By the way, a shrewd observer will notice that Scotia itself doesn’t seem to have been a highlight. We’d meant to spend more time looking around there as well as Schenectady — just didn’t, as it happened, have the time to spend. Even the meals were cursory — two of the three were simple takeout or delivery at the hotel. The third was a surprise — a Japanese restaurant which probably rates among the top dozen meals we’ve had on the trip so far… But yeah, we just didn’t experience Scotia enough to do it, well, justice.

🔊 Listen to this

Let’s get a little administrative detail out of the way, shall we? I’m speaking of course of the obvious fact: there’s been nothing new added here in two freaking weeks. And this bloggish background silence has taken place behind a foreground that included (as of today) stops not only in New York State, but in Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. So there’s a lot of catching up to do… and this means, I think, that I’m going to accelerate the schedule a bit: I’ll just post brief narratives of each of those missing places, until the catching-up is accomplished.

(Remember: if you’re after a more up-to-date sense of where we are, the best place to look is probably my Instagram account. That, too, isn’t 100% current, because I’m posting only one photo a day. But it will at least reassure you that We Are (as the saying goes) Still Here.

Let’s get started!

Putting Henri Behind Us

Despite our worst fears about Hurricane Henri, the storm really didn’t bother us until shortly after we left the Indian Head Resort…

Once we’d decided to flee further inland, we pulled up the maps of what lay to the west. To head to Vermont felt like too small a baby step, given Henri’s forecast cone, so we jumped right over there and looked at northern New York State (i.e., “anywhere north of Albany”). Part of my motivation, I think, was that it would put us on the way to our western New York State destinations, Niagara Falls and Jamestown, which might simplify the next-state planning. (I was very disappointed that Vermont appeared to be out of the question, but, well, as we’d already learned: the road trip taketh away as well as giveth.)

But then we noticed something we simply couldn’t ignore: the route would take us verrrrry close to Enfield, NH, where one of The Missus’s favorite nieces had just bought her first home (with her husband and daughter). So as I drove, The Missus burned up the (wireless) phone lines with The Enfield Niecelet, making plans for our stop along the way.

We got a tour of the house, of course, and visited The Niecelet’s Husband at his workplace, and then we The Niecelet, and the Grand-Niecelet headed out for lunch. It was a nice meal in nearby Lebanon, but by the time we paid the check there were already raindrops falling on our heads.

Off we headed, westward… into the worst of Henri we experienced.

Was it a good thing or a bad thing that we’d opted not to take any major highways? Well, it depends on the kind of route you’d find more suited to your personality, given a whiteout-level rainfall:

• On a highway, even the straightest, you not only are moving faster, but also are just incapable of seeing the other vehicles around you until it’s (almost) too late.
• On back roads, at least in New Hampshire/Vermont, probably won’t be sharing the trip with many other vehicles at all. On the other hand, such vehicles as you do encounter are likely operated by locals who well know the sinuous twists and turns, the spots most likely to be shallowly flooded, the surprise stop signs and bear-crossing signs and so on, and so those vehicles will be riding your tail the whole way. And, of course, you still can’t see anything further than about a car’s-length in any direction.

So it was pretty white-knuckle driving, all the way…

…all the way until we crossed into Vermont. Suddenly the clouds parted, the rain stopped, and we could just enjoy the rest of the drive to Saratoga Springs.

Last Week of the Saratoga Springs Racing Season

Somehow — I certainly don’t know how — we’d managed to secure two nights’ last-minute lodging at a very nice Holiday Inn in Saratoga Springs. Even more remarkably, this was during the last week of the biggest tourist event in the town, during the craziest tourist season in anyone’s recent memory: the final week of horse-racing season. The town, in other words, was mobbed. Even more surprisingly, we were able to extend our stay for a couple more nights.

(We wanted to extend the stay for a number of reasons: Saratoga is such a nice town, with such a nice downtown, and neither of us had ever been there before; we felt like we really needed a break — we were tired of thinking we had to run away from something, or to run somewhere, like Bar Harbor, which became this hard, fixed external thing which controlled our schedule; and we really needed to do laundry (heh) — this Holiday Inn offered free laundry facilities for guests.)

Highlights of the Saratoga Springs visit:

• Laundry. (No, really: this was important by now!)
• I’d bought a replacement (used) camera, making up for the one which had gone belly-up way back in Greenville NC. I’d had it shipped it to my brother’s, thinking we could pick it up the next time we were in NJ… but since we were now staying in Saratoga Springs for a whole week, I could arrange for him to overnight it to me at the hotel. (Hurrah!)
• I had a couple hearing-aid-related near-disasters — which seemed disastrous enough that I was in genuine despair about them for about 24 hours. (Neither truly was a disaster, thank God. But it was a near thing.)
• We bought gear for what we imagined to be some upcoming trail adventures: “trekking poles”; compasses; binoculars.
• Fabulous meals, with drinks to match (here, here, and here — in addition to the nice food and cocktails offered by the hotel itself), served by almost frighteningly competent and cheerful waitstaff.

In fact, we enjoyed our stay there so much that we tried to extend it again… but no such luck: not just the Holiday Inn, but everywhere else in Saratoga Spring was booked solid for the very last couple of days of the season. So: last-minute emergency strategizing occurred. Stay tuned!

We now have a definite must-leave-by date: next Friday, July 30 — that is, the day our hosts leave for a long-planned (and frankly, long-desperate-for) five-day drive to Michigan and back. Our intention, though, is to leave a couple-three-four days before that, to give them some time to tie up some loose ends here with their home and business.

But, well… 2021, right? The Year of Overturned Schedules. (And we thought 2020 was bad: bwaa-ha-ha!) So, not counting any chickens. We’ll just have to see.

Those of you who remember our (thanks, COVID-19!) disastrously anticlimactic “EuroTour 2020” planning may remember the colorful schedule I came up with, Whether you remember it or not, shown at right is a trimmed-down version of the “USTour 2021” counterpart.

(Click on that image to see the first page in full, including how to interpret the various color codes. Glutton for punishment? Click here for page 2.)

As with last year’s “schedule,” our objective with this one is to minimize the varieties of climate we need to pack for. I probably don’t need to tell you that one of us is more amenable to warmer temperatures than the other, and vice-versa for the cooler. But we just won’t have enough room in the car to pack the clothes we might need for every eventuality, no matter when we visit Location X, Y, or Z.

Once you get past September, the choices get narrower and narrower; we need to avoid really cold weather — and the possibility of snow — which likely puts some of the northern- and westernmost regions beyond reach for this trip. No help for it, alas…! As it is, as you can see if you’ve checked out the full page-2 image, even the notoriously roasting California and Southwest states look a bit iffy in November and December…

Who knows, maybe a later version of this schedule will add in a loop through Mexico, Costa Rica, etc.