Monday, June 8th

Lakes

At some time early morning, suspicious noise started outside. Luckily, it wasn’t the sound of the two convicted murderers that had escaped from prison in a movie plot not far from here two days ago, but something as profane as rain. It still was rather surprising, given the lovely evening. Opening the curtains, I found very low clouds drifting by fast. When I fished out my rain coat and went for breakfast, I found temperature to be still pleasant, though, almost seventy Fahrenheit the thermometer reported.

Some coffee, the wonderfully innocuous kind they serve here, later, I headed out, following the river upstream. The road split the landscape in two. The river was to its right, a few hundred metres away. On this side there was a constant string of properties, only interrupted by the occasional state park, one of which even featured a golf course. The left side, meanwhile, was farmland or forest.

Even though it had started to rain again, pouring torrentially even for a while, people were out on the river sailing. I was entering the Thousand Island Region where the St. Lawrence Stream emerged from Lake Ontario amidst a rather large number of islands. There was Thousand Island Bridge across to Canada. I was almost certain I had been on the other side before but couldn’t figure out when that could have been.

The rain stopped as I arrived in Clayton, centre of the region on the American side. I crossed through and kept following the shore. There were lots of little bays now, filled with boat launches and jetties. In between there were resorts and RV parks aplenty. Yet still, perhaps because it was Monday, everything was quiet and the road was nearly empty.

The closer I got to the lake, the stronger a wind pushed my car around. In Cape Vincent, villas in parks, I decided for a detour to Tibbets Point that looked to be the spot where lake turned river. The map promoted Tibbets Point Lighthouse and I knew it would be disappointing. All lighthouses on all my trips so far had been. Why, I wondered still driving along, did I even bother.

The road directly followed the river shore. There were house after house on the left. Many of them had a little deck or at least a bench across the road and directly on the river. The point was quite far. The wind became stronger and stronger, there were crests atop the waves now.

Eventually, I arrived at the lighthouse. There was no suggestion that parking would cost money. I was shocked. In fact, a sign suggested that the community of Cape Vincent had purchased the area from the National Park Service in order to make it available to everyone.

I parked behind the visitor centre and wandered across a lawn to the stubby little lighthouse. Next to it was a building, a glorified shed, really, that contained the foghorn. There also was a lighthouse keeper’s home and, someone oddly, a hostel. I would have loved to linger some more, but pleasant temperature or not, the wind made it rather difficult. It also started to rain again. Thus driven away I drove away.

The highway was labelled as the Seaway Trail, an American Byway following the Great Lakes shores through New York State. It mostly kept back from the shores, though, travelling through grassland, the occasional forest and the occasional village. Sign after sign suggested a state park to the right. Swallows were busy hunting across the road, forced low by the weather and sweeping by precariously close to the car. Lots of businesses had Ontario in their name. Even though this may have been understandable, what with Lake Ontario just a turn away, but it was still strange to see the term used so frequently this side of the border.

A sign suggested that Mexico was just 28 miles away. Sadly, though, I turned onto another road soon, not going to Mexico at all. Instead, amidst another bout of heavy rain, I arrived in Oswego. Announced by two tall smoke stacks, it contained a rather long main street, split in two by a wide river and, among other less important things, featuring a small independent book store. A good town, then.

The main road ventured further inland after Oswego, but there was a side street that stuck closer to the shores. I took it and when eventually it finished its detour, the main road had turned into a busy thoroughfare. Clearly, it was time to turn south.

I crossed the Erie Canal in Clyde, all lazy brown water with water plants the only customers. A little further south I crossed its grandchild, the New York State Thruway motorway. Its fallout resulted in rather busy road. There particularly were lots of trucks. They weren’t even just travelling through, but emerged from many a side road. I had arrived in the outskirts of Seneca Falls, a busy industrial town by the looks of it.

Seneca Falls proper began, after turning east, with a police cruiser parked, lights flashing, outside a doughnut shop. The city was endless and busy. When I finally were ordered to turn south again, I crossed the tamed Seneca River, no signs of any falls anywhere.

A little south was Five Points Correctional Facility. By now I was used to the official, to my ear slightly ill-considered euphemism for a prison. But Five Points sounded strangely familiar. Perhaps I had seen one too many cop shows set in New York.

According to the map, the road was supposed to follow the eastern shore of a long, narrow lake running north to south, Seneca Lake. For complicated reasons, the slopes of such a lake are ideal for growing wine. Indeed, wineries abounded. This was the Finger Lakes wine region, named so because there were more long, narrow lakes to the west and east.

It was probably rather pretty here, reminiscent of Switzerland’s Lake Neuchâtel, but it had started to rain heavily again. As the road was rather busy and started to wind down to the lake, driving had become a priority over sightseeing. I caught a glimpse of Hector Falls, a multi-step waterfall, before finally arriving down in the plains smack by the entrance to the lake at Watkins Glen.

I crossed a river with the mandatory factory by its side and into pretty town of red brick and villas in their own parks. For some reason, the city had decided to route through traffic along the street that passed by all three schools. Such an alignment warrants something called a school zone, an area of a temporary speed limit, a really quite slow fifteen miles per hour here. As it was school run time, the zone was active and process slow.

Finally out of town, the road didn’t have much choice but follow the valley of the river that fed the lake. The valley was busy, village after village, and so was the road. Finally, the valley closed in, the road climbed out and I arrived at a motorway.

Quickly glancing at the map, I decided east was the more promising direction for the now standard procedure of following the motorway until an acceptable hotel was announced. Horseheads, where I would have loved to have spent the night, and Elmira didn’t seem to have anything to offer, but the next town did.

That town, in fact, was two: Waverly and Sayre. The state line between New York and Pennsylvania ran straight through in a mindless, latitudal fashion. I ended up in Sayre and thus in Pennsylvania.