Today we took a fall train ride. There’s a train that does scenic rides out of the depot in Hamburg, NY. We did this a year ago and greatly enjoyed it, so we did it again today. It’s an out-and-back ride, covering maybe twenty miles out and twenty back, or maybe less; the train slows way down when going over two trestles that cross the two branches of Eighteen Mile Creek, mainly so people on board can go Ooooh and Aaaaah and take pictures.
First, when going on a train ride, one dresses appropriately. Bring on the hickory stripes!
It was also cool out, hence the scarf. First wearing of a scarf this season!
Also, a couple of the workers on the train complimented my outfit. So that’s two weekends in a row getting compliments on my overalls. Yay! (I really love the hickory stripe pattern, if you couldn’t tell.)
And now, photos. All of these were taken on the return trip, when I got the window seat; The Wife had the window on the way out. WNY is putting on a lovely show so far this fall, I must admit. The stream is Eighteen Mile Creek, which actually has two branches that meet in a confluence a mile or so downstream of each place where the train crosses. The creek is named by virtue of its mouth lying eighteen miles downshore from the beginning of the Niagara River.
I’m told there is lots of good hiking along Eighteen Mile Creek. Cane and I never made it down here. Alas….
If you want to see all of the photos from the ride, plus a video I culled together, it’s all in a Flickr album, here.
Now, photos:
Today was the kind of day when the sun came and went and the clouds moved so quickly you could see their shadows rolling across the fields.This is just somebody’s yard, but they have three giant willow trees. I love willows. I wonder how the one in front of our old house is doing….
Lots of old railroad detritus on the sidings by the depot.
It’s Monday! And as promised, The Wife and I are back from our too-brief (aren’t they all?) weekend getaway. After the general shit-show that was Summer 2022 for us, we really needed a nice getaway. And that’s exactly what we had. The focus was the Ithaca Apple Festival, with a few stops here and there along the way.
I really love Ithaca. It’s by far my favorite place in New York State thus far in my life.
I always plan on taking a lot more photos in Ithaca than I do! It’s weird, really. I just get caught up in people-watching and looking at all the wonderful stuff that I don’t get my phone or my camera out much.
Now, Taughannock Falls? That’s where I take a bunch of pictures. Here are a few from this year.
Lots of raptors on the wing at the falls. I assume these are turkey vultures, which are amazing to watch in themselves in places with high cliffs, like here and at Letchworth.A lovely couple! Hopefully next year we can walk the ravine trail below and finally see the falls from below. The Wife’s surgically-repaired ankle isn’t quite up to that yet, but we’ll get there!
We stop at Taughannock Falls every year. It just doesn’t seem right to visit Ithaca without stopping here. There’s something about all the streams and water and waterfalls and rocky gorges and deep verdant forests in this region that add up to it being my spiritual home.
Starting now, of course, there’s also a bittersweet quality to this place. We brought Cane here several times, while on our winter winery trip. I’d like to think that he had some hand in making this year’s visit almost perfect, with the beginnings of the autumnal crisp in the air and the perfect golden light.
We also stopped at a winery that had a great view! The wines weren’t to our taste, but the view sure was. (Nothing wrong with their wine; they specialize in dry wines, and we generally prefer the other end of that spectrum, being more into fruity and vibrant and sometimes outright sweet.)
Part of the magic of the Finger Lakes is that from atop the ridges you can see for miles and miles, and in many spots you can’t see the deep lake that lies between you and there.
On Sunday we set out for home, with a couple stops along the way, including the Barnes&Noble in Pittsford. This is the most beautiful B&N that I have ever seen:
What a store! An employee asked me at one point if I needed help finding anything, and I laughed and replied, “No, I need help NOT finding things!” Good thing I only go to this store once a year, really.
Of course, we ate very well on this little trip. We always plan our meals, partly because when we’re traveling we want to eat well, but also because The Wife is celiac which always requires some extra planning. Luckily we’ve found a bunch of places all throughout the region that have gluten-free offerings…though sadly, one of our favorites, is closing for good in a few weeks. Ithaca’s Waffle Frolic has been a beloved stop of ours for almost as long as we’ve been going to Ithaca at all, but the owners have decided to move on. We’ll find other options, but a special shout-out to all the times we stopped there for fried chicken and waffles! I remember when I first heard of that combo and thought it was the weirdest thing ever, until we tried it at Waffle Frolic and…suddenly, we got it.
I think this winter I’m going to have to figure out my own version of it.
I won’t subject you to pictures of all the food we had, but just a couple things:
That’s a Cuban sandwich from the Broadway Deli right here in Lancaster, NY. We love to start our road-trips east with a stop here for lunch, before we exit the 716. They have a wonderful sandwich menu, and yet somehow they’re never mentioned in local “Best Sandwich in Buffalo” rankings! They’ve got my vote, though.
We also love getting breakfast on Sunday morning at a place in Pittsford called Simply Crepes. (There are several locations around Greater Rochester, by the way.) They have a terrific menu, lots of GF options, and…well, if you’re looking for hearty-and-filling-and-not-exactly-healthy in your breakfast (and you absolutely should look for those things in a breakfast, maybe not all the time, but once in a while), you should look no farther. Here is my “Crepe Madame”, a crepe loaded with cheese and ham and smothered with white sauce and topped with a fried egg and served with two pools of bacon jam:
Ate this around 10am. I was not hungry again until dinner.
I really love places like Simply Crepes. There’s something about local breakfast joints (they’re not just a breakfast joint, to be fair), the kind of place where you go on a cold fall morning to cup your hands around the coffee mug before the food comes. It’s the kind of place that fills up first with kind-of bleary-eyed people mostly clad in soft flannels and their hair in messy buns, the kind of crowd that you can watch wake up as they drink their coffee and eat their breakfasts. The mood shifts later on, once the post-church “Sunday Best” people start showing up. The new mood then isn’t bad, per se, but it’s more formal and less patient.
Simply Crepes, Pittsford, NY.
Simply Crepes is located in Schoen Place in Pittsford, which is an old industry and trade center right on the Erie Canal. I imagine barges laden with goods used to arrive here, or empty barges arrived to be laden with goods; there’s a grain elevator down the street that has been converted to office space. The area has a terrific vibe that I think Buffalo is trying to capture with its inner harbor area.
Coffee in glass mugs.
I think that my favorite New York region, after the Finger Lakes and Buffalo Niagara, is the Erie Canal corridor and the old rail corridor that runs sometimes alongside the Canal and at other times ten to twenty miles south of it. All those old towns along the Canal and the once great railroads have such wonderful age and character to them, with a sense of weathered history connecting all of it. You can see plainly that in a lot of these towns the boom-times are long over, but you can also see that the people still there are working hard to keep their towns stubbornly alive. Yes, there are a lot of empty buildings in states of decay, but there are also lots of said old buildings with obvious work going on and “Coming Soon!” signs in the windows, announcing new businesses. There are a lot of people who are unwilling to give up on New York, and I salute them, each and every one.
Let’s see, what else? I got a little writing done this weekend, in the hotel room. Not much, but a little. As long as the words keep trickling, it’s fine.
Also, it was a great weekend for my new fashion concept of the last year or two, the “Renfest Cottagecore” thing I’ve been working on.
There were a lot of people in Ithaca wearing overalls, so I can honestly say that they’re finally back! Their banishment during the 2000s and quite a bit of the 10s made for a “lonely soldier assigned to a solitary remote outpost” feel for me during a lot of that period. I hope they stick around now that they’ve recovered from their banishment during that mostly-ugly era of form-fitting, show-every-curve period of fashion that was really pretty unpleasant.
At the bookstore. Maybe a future author pic!
The Universe actually gave me some direct confirmation of my fashion concept yesterday: an employee at Trader Joe’s complimented my shirt, and then, half an hour later, an employee at Barnes&Noble said, “I love your overalls!”
It’s the little things, isn’t it?
Anyway, we’re home now. I’m not back to work for a few days–I always make my autumn vacation a good long one–but we’re home. Back to a bit of normal life, some of which we actually missed. Which things would those be? Well….
When one gets home from work to start a vacation, one puts on overalls and pours a Scotch. It’s just what one does.
I like Scotch. Scotchy Scotch Scotch. Here it goes down. Down into my belly.
:: Teevee show you should watch: The World According to Jeff Goldblum, on Disney Plus. It’s a series of light-hearted and fascinating mini-documentaries about mundane subjects, starring some actor named Jeff Goldblum.
:: Finally, a photo I took of my street on a dark morning in early autumn, when the sky was gray and the streetlights weren’t off yet. One thing I like about the rise of LED technology is that the streetlights now cast old-school pools of light, like they used to in all the old noir films. I processed this photo through the Prisma app to get this effect.
Taken the other evening. The sun had not quite set all the way, but was almost gone, and all that was left was the red light on the tops of the trees. These trees haven’t begun turning yet.
Had things gone according to plan, today would have seen the launch of Artemis I, the first rocket in a series of missions intended to return humans to the Moon. Sadly, Artemis did not launch. This is not a bad thing. There is a reason why we say something is not difficult via the pithy metaphor, “Hey, this ain’t rocket science.”
So, no launch…but there is still something amazing and beautiful about a rocket being readied for its flight.
I had a lovely writing session outside yesterday, but here Carla appears to be laughing at my work. Hmmmm.
In other news, my newest newsletter issue is available! You should sign up, because it’s fun getting things in e-mail. Link is in the sidebar! And hey, if you don’t feel like going to the sidebar, there’s a link right here!
Our summers often pivot on two fairs: the Sterling Renaissance Festival, and the Erie County Fair, which we attended on Friday the 12th. (I would have posted about it sooner, but then that dumbassed virus showed up and put its feet on the furniture and drank from coasterless glasses and got crumbs over everything and was basically just a big asshole.) While The Wife was unable to attend Sterling because of her recent foot surgery, she was able to attend the County Fair, by virtue of a day-long scooter rental.
This year we were graced with probably the most perfect weather for the Fair we’ve ever had: it was clear with low humidity, there was a light breeze all day, and the high temperature was 72 or so. It was simply a perfect day for going to the Fair.
We had a mostly great day, though The Wife petered out quickly by the end (it was her first major long outing since before her foot surgery in June). There are some notable things from years past that aren’t there anymore, which does happen every year but seems more sadly common moving forward. The biggest thing I missed this year was the giant model railroad exhibit that used to always be set up in the Grange Building; hopefully that manages to return next year. Also, the lovely old building that used to house the woodcarving exhibits is entirely gone, having been demolished for safety reasons, which is a shame. The Fair is still a huge amount of fun and can easily kill and entire day, but it did feel–this year and last–a bit more wide-open, which is to say, a bit more empty. I’m hoping for rebounds in the future, but…who knows.
After reading lots of online complaining about prices, I have to report that while prices were up, they did not seem wildly up to me. I spent roughly what I usually spend in terms of food, plus a little. But I never got the sticker shock that I had at the Sterling Renfest when I saw that the turkey legs that were once $9 are now $16. They also rolled parking and admission into a single price, which eliminates the need for money handlers at the parking entrances and makes getting into the park that much quicker, but folks are complaining about that online too, for reasons I can’t fathom.
Here are some photos from our day at The Fair. I have more available in a Flickr album, if you like this sort of thing.
Proper Fair attire.Wide view of one of the main junctions at the Fair. No, I did not eat at Mr. Sticky’s. Sticky buns and cinnamon rolls are wonderful, but I can’t eat such heavy stuff at The Fair.
I always love the ole firefighting equipment.
This guy won SECOND place for woodcarving! I’d have given it first, which went to a duck decoy. (Yes, it was a VERY well-done duck. I just love this dude better!)
Beautiful chess board! I like how this carver took inspiration from, but did not reproduce, the classic Staunton pieces.Always a favorite thing: the quilts.Mural on the Grandstand exterior.We don’t eat NEARLY as much at The Fair as we used to. Ribbon fries, though, are ESSENTIAL.Dinner is always Chiavetta’s. I make some mean Chiavetta’s in my backyard, but the pros just somehow always seem to get it done just right.Sheep. (I am not convinced that sheeps and goats aren’t somehow the same beasties, just at different points in their lives. I mean, I know they’re not, but some part of me remains pretty sure they are.)The Fair is most beautiful at the end of the day and into early evening. We left shortly after taking this. Hopefully next year we can manage a little later stay….
Our summers are partially dominated by two Fairs: the Sterling Renaissance Festival (or Faire), and the Erie County Fair. We’ve done the former already, and later today, we go to the latter! More to come on that…but for now, here’s my favorite of all the photos I’ve ever taken at the EC Fair. I took this eleven years ago, and I’m not sure which camera this was. But I like the energy here and the gentle hazing of the light….
