Eight Years!

Tuesday we celebrated our eighth wedding anniversary with a loaf of banana bread I had baked on Saturday.  Neither of us had time to shop for presents, so we decided to take a trip instead.  We made reservations at Prospect Point Cabins on Blue Mountain Lake in Adirondack Park.  We left work early Friday afternoon and drove up, about a 75 mile trip. This was the view from our cabin door Saturday morning.

This is a view of the interior--as you can see, quite rustic.  It had a living room with a day bed plus chairs, a dining table and full kitchen, plus two bedrooms and a large bathroom with bunches of towels in case we wanted to take a dip in the lake.  Since we had to check out by 9:00 a.m., we didn't.

We drove up to Indian Lake for supper Friday evening since there were no restaurants in Blue Mountain Lake.  Bill had a generous chicken club sandwich and I had tempura shrimp served with orange ginger sauce and corn pudding.  The pudding was kind of like a savory custard with whole kernels of corn and green chilies.  It was great, once I got accustomed to the texture.

This is a view of the cabin we stayed in.  We had half of the downstairs portion of the cabin.  We wondered what the upstairs accommodations were like.

Breakfast was served in the main cabin and was scrumptious--scrambled eggs and mini soufles, muffins and waffles, sausage, bacon and meatballs; fruit and steel-cut oats with all the fixings.  We sat with a family from Rochester that had been coming to Prospect Point for four years.  Very nice people.

We were a little disappointed with the autumn leaves.  We were expecting bright reds, golds, oranges and yellows like the pictures you see of Vermont.  However, there were lots of trees that had already lost their leaves and maybe one in ten that had turned a modest shade of yellow or red.

One of the kitchen staff told us that the peak of color had happened last week, but that this wasn't a really good year.  A lot of the leaves got knocked off by all the storms over the past couple of weeks, so there just weren't many leaves left.  You can see some of them on the ground in the picture above.

There are so many lakes in Adirondack Park, that they started naming them by number--Eighth Lake, Seventh Lake, etc.  I think this is Fifth Lake.  You can get a better idea of the lack of color in these pictures.  But it was still beautiful.

Old Forge is a tourist town located in the southern end of the park.  It has many curio shops, antique stores, what-not shops and hardware stores--I counted three!  One is called the Old Forge Hardware Store and More.  And it really is.  It is huge, with lots of rooms and additions.  They sell hardware as well as gifts, gourmet food, log furniture,clothes, books, toys, kitchen wares including cookie jars, curios and what-nots.  This picture is of the yarn room which had all kinds of yarn from acrylic to merino wool, alpaca and whatever else you can imagine.  It was fun browsing, but I couldn't imagine a project that I would want to spend $8-$9 (and up to $25!) a skein on.

 The Touch of Ritz was a whirligig place with all their wares displayed outside.  There were animals, insects and fish and a small school bus, bicycles, motorcycles, windmills, etc., all with whirling parts set in motion by the wind.  It was fascinating, but I was reminded why I had always liked this sort of thing but had never purchased one--$75 seems like a lot to pay for a polyester toy that will probably only last one season.

When we got home Saturday afternoon, we drove out to the chapel in Oneida for a baptism and discovered that the last five miles of that trip was full of trees with the most beautiful autumn leaves!  Much prettier than what we had seen in Adirondack Park.  The color had developed since last Sunday and will probably be gone by next week.  We are surely enjoying them while they last.

It's been a wonderful eight years and we are looking forward to many more together.