Nothing Mundane

December 15, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 12.5: Drinking & Driving in Charlotte & Asheville… Respectively.

Welcome back friends! If you didn’t see it, we just posted a… post… about our RV renovations, where you can get a glimpse of our high-ambition, low-skill interior remodeling. The renovation was certainly a learning experience, and as the days go by, and our memories fade, it’s something that we might take up again in the new year. The bedroom won’t renovate itself! [Ed. note: Heather added those last two sentences unilaterally. They do not represent the opinions of all Nothing Mundane affiliates.]

Returning to our road trip, we traveled from Richmond, Virginia to North Carolina, “Ol’ Northy,” and the metropolitan regions of Charlotte and Asheville. Our mission: have fun and mooch off our friends.

Charlotte

We’ve been to a lot of places on this road trip, and sometimes it can be difficult to find a good place to eat or fun things to do. Well, we stayed in Charlotte with our friends the Casses, and one of the great things about visiting people is that they already know the cool things to do. For example, we had dinner at a pretty sweet bar and grill called Lebowski’s, where the food was good and the excuse to run a picture of Jake’s “The Dude” Halloween costume was made plausible.

A surprising favorite stop in Charlotte was the Lost Duffer mini-golf course, which we tried on a whim. The first half was hilariously easy, each cup placed at the bottom of a hole resembling a giant funnel, but hey – you don’t play mini-golf to feel humiliated. The second half of the course then went underground, into an “abandoned mine” that was definitely not “the basement of the building.” It was dark enough that we sometimes had to play by phone flashlight, and the holes were humiliatingly challenging, but hey – you don’t play mini-golf to feel successful.

The whole experience was charmingly insane, and we would definitely go back.

We also toured the hip areas of Charlotte, stopping in for some iced coffee (served in a mason jar) which we foolishly ordered “to stay.” Have you ever just sat around in a stylish coffee shop, drinking delicious coffee out of a mason jar, with nothing to do but talk to your good friends you haven’t seen in ages? So boring. We quickly pivoted to a game of 2-player reactor.

Let’s face it, human interaction is overrated, and if we’re being honest, we drank and/or gamed our way across the city. We had great German beers at a local beer hall, combined with the first of many games of Carcassonne (a Nothing Mundane favorite and a great addition to any board game collection). One highlight of this beer hall: there was a corporate event being held there, and although almost everyone was dressed normally, one guy showed up in full German mountain-man regalia.

Dress for the job you want, not the job you have!

One thing we’ve found on this trip is that, thanks to the craft brewing revolution, you can get fantastic beer anywhere these days. (The tiny grocery store in Marfa, Texas – population 2,000 – had an entire refrigerator devoted to microbrews.) And in a big city like Charlotte, the options are endless – we visited several great breweries just within a few blocks of each other. Not a bad time to be alive!

Also, there were donuts.

Mmm, doughnuts #donuts

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on Sep 19, 2015 at 9:38am PDT

We made one final sightseeing stop in Charlotte, heading to the Wing Haven Garden and Bird Sanctuary to make some avian friends. The founders of Wing Haven were a husband and wife who gardened extensively, nursed baby birds back to health, and did many other do-gooder type things. This resulted in a bird sanctuary that was overflowing with beautiful birds, right in the middle of the city.

At least, that was the impression given by the mandatory 15 minute introductory video, which looked suspiciously like it was shot in the 1970s.

Here in the 2010s, the founders passed away many, many years ago, and in the course of a half-hour walk around the property, we did not see a single bird. We didn’t see any wildlife at all, actually, not even a squirrel. We can’t complain too much, since the garden was pretty, and admission was free. But would it be too much to ask for them to tie a bird to a tree or something, just to keep up appearances?

Is that a bird on the ground? Oh… no, just a rock.

Asheville

We hung out with the Casses for a few days, but before we left North Carolina for good, we took a day trip west to visit Asheville. Asheville is a quirky, fun mountain town with fantastic 1920’s style art deco architecture, thanks to a decades-long economic depression that prevented any new buildings from being constructed. Nothing preserves like bankruptcy!

Those days are long gone, and Asheville today is pretty trendy. The brunch spots were jammed, but we persevered, and ended up having the best fried chicken biscuit of our lives at Southern Kitchen. There were loads of cool shops, too – we wandered into a quirky gift store that had a display on RV living. (We are trendy by association!) It’s also extremely liberal, and it strongly reminded us of Ithaca, New York, where we lived for three years – particularly when we wandered by a streetside hippie peace festival, which aimed to stem the power of corporations via tambourine.

However, there’s certainly still a bit of Appalachia present. Outside of one restaurant, we saw a guy in a bluegrass band playing an actual washboard, which is all it takes to make our day.

Blue Ridge Parkway

Our final adventure in North Carolina was on the way back from Asheville, as we drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway. We only saw about 35 miles of the Parkway’s 470 mile length, but what we saw was insanely beautiful. The scenery is gorgeous, with pristine rivers, lakes, and forests in front of endless mountains ridges.

We can’t possibly recommend this one enough, with one caveat: the Asheville-to-Charlotte leg doesn’t have a clearly defined end point, so be careful where you exit. We left the Parkway at a random point, and found ourselves more or less on top of a mountain in the deep wilderness, driving down the most switchback-y road in the history of switchbacks. It was cool! But it also took us an hour to go about 3 miles.

Photographing the photographer. #blueridge #blueridgeparkway #asheville #northcarolina

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on Sep 20, 2015 at 4:01pm PDT

Dammit, Joseph!

LAST BITS

What’s next: Currently, we are in Phoenix, Arizona, “Ol’ Phoenie,” which is surprisingly pretty but disappointingly cold. Tomorrow, we’re ditching the RV for a month and beginning a 5-day, several-thousand-mile drive back to the Northeast for the holidays. We’re planning to stop in El Paso, Roswell, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Nashville, and who knows where else. Wish us luck!

Obligatory social media self-promotion: If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates. All the cool kids are doing it.

Shamefully missed a prior post? We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.

Next Post: Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

December 2, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 12: Footloose in Richmond

Heading south from Washington, D.C., we headed towards Richmond, Virginia, the third stop on our “Race to San Antonio.” We were only in town for two days, which was a shame, because (1) Richmond was pretty cool, and (2) our RV park was right next to a well-regarded brewery (!) and we never got a chance to check it out.

But that’s OK, since it turns out Richmond has a lot of breweries. In fact, we met Heather’s friend Tex at a brewery on our first night in Richmond. The beer was tasty, and the men’s room art was sublime.

Not a bad start to our 36 hours in #richmond.

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on Sep 15, 2015 at 4:52pm PDT

Found in the men’s room of a Richmond brewery. A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on Sep 18, 2015 at 11:23am PDT

Southern Fury

We started our full day in Richmond with Monument Avenue. It’s a wide, tree-filled boulevard featuring statues of Civil War Confederate bigwigs, along with, for some reason, Arthur Ashe. If you don’t know who that is (we didn’t), he was a Richmond native and the first black man to win the singles in Wimbledon and the US Open. (He also left Richmond because it was horribly segregated.) His statue was added in 1996, long after the others, and was quite a controversy at the time.

Today, in your humble correspondents’ opinion, the statue is still controversial, but only because it appears to depict Mr. Ashe beating children with a tennis racket and/or throwing a Bible at them. He may also be defending himself from zombie children; it’s unclear. Either way, we can’t support this statue: a tennis racket is a terrible choice of weapon.

We followed Monument Avenue, and eventually ended up downtown with plans to explore the state capitol building, John Marshall’s house, and some other historical stuff. Unfortunately, approximately 8 seconds into viewing the (very pretty) capitol, Heather’s flip-flop strap broke in an un-fixable and un-walkable manner. She ended up walking the several blocks back to where we parked our car barefoot, and we came to appreciate that Richmond is very clean.

Nice place for a barefoot walk…

Heather was too embarrassed to go into a real shoe store, and she didn’t want to drive all the way back to the RV Park to get another pair of shoes, so we drove to a Target in the suburbs. She ended up getting a pair of ankle boots to replace her flip-flops, because style, and nobody at Target said anything about the fact that Heather’s flip-flop was tied onto her foot with a hair band.

We celebrated the new arrangement with some monstrously large sandwiches from the Black Sheep. The sandwiches are called “battleships,” and the menu section for the battleships is titled “The War of Northern Ingestion.” We got two half-size portions of the SS Sultana and the USS Roanoke, which proceeded to defeat us deliciously in gastric combat.

Southern Hospitality

After slipping into and emerging from a light food coma, we headed to Maymont Mansion, a beautiful plantation-type house constructed in the early 1900s. Maymont has been preserved as a public park, and the furnishings inside were in remarkably good shape. Also in remarkably good shape was our tour guide through the mansion, Bill, who is 97 years old and still going strong. Although he couldn’t really hear us, he still has a tour guide’s booming voice, and he climbs stairs like a man of no more than 67 years, tops. Bill was alive when the mansion’s owner passed away in 1925! Crazy.

We had to point out one highlight from the below photo of the lady’s bedroom. The swan bed is cool, but check out the vanity and chair to its left. They are made from the tusks of Narwhals! Narwhals are basically the unicorns of the sea, and this furniture is made from their horns. Woah.

After leaving the mansion we strolled around the English and Japanese gardens, which were beautiful and huge. Heather’s choice of high-heeled ankle boots were not exactly perfect for the cobblestone and grass walkways, but she was a trooper, and only walked barefoot through the gardens for a little bit.

This blog post should probably be subtitled, “Heather walks around Richmond barefoot.”

The English Garden was lovely, but the Japanese Garden was even prettier. There were a lot of fun features, including stepping stones in the giant koi pond.

A study in contrasts: Jake vs. Heather in the Japanese Garden.

Last night

We met up with Tex again, who treated us to a fantastic dinner at Millie’s Diner. The staff was friendly, the food was great, and the walls are adorned with creepy, steam-punk babies from a local artist. All you can ask for in a meal, really.

LAST BITS

What’s next: Currently, we are in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where it is freaking freezing. We’re going to head west to the Four Corners and the Grand Canyon as soon as we can defrost our RV.

Shamefully missed a prior post? We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.

Next Post: Intermission: Renovation

November 12, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 11: Address – Gettysburg

After getting our fill of bagels, pizza, and herds of tourists in NYC, we packed up our RV and began the quickest part of our trip: getting to San Antonio for our friends’ wedding. Like the plot of a bad movie, we had exactly one month to make it to Texas, and we were about 2,100 miles away (as the RV drives).

These constraints required us to come up with an actual travel itinerary, which was a challenge. For those who might not know, we are more or less incapable of planning ahead. We were engaged for over three years before we finally had a wedding because it just seemed like it would be so much work. (We were right!) Well, although we grumbled a bit (read: a lot), and procrastinated a bit (ditto), we did eventually manage to pick a route to San Antonio. It consisted of 10 stops in cities, mountains, and beaches, and – spoiler alert – it worked! We made it to the wedding on time.

This blog post is about our first stop on this route: Dover, Pennsylvania.

Farm Country

Heather’s friend from college, Trisha, and her husband Greg graciously agreed to put us up for 2 nights at their house in Dover. Dover is south of Harrisburg, in southern-central Pennsylvania, and relatively near to Amish farm country. Trish and Greg live in a cool old farm house that Greg has been renovating beautifully over the years, situated on a plot of land big enough to amaze your humble recently-Manhattan-dwelling correspondents.

Our favorite part? We met the friendly women who live next door, who were tossing some wicked Frisbee – hard, fast, accurate forehands and backhands, even a hammer, all the while running and jumping gracefully to snag the disc out of the air. Here’s the fun part: they were Mennonites, wearing traditional garb! (Like this.) Guess they’ve had a lot of time to practice while waiting for the crops to come in.

Speaking of crops: Trish and Greg’s house is in some of the world’s greatest farmland, and although we visited a little after the summer peak, Trish’s garden was overflowing. There were more tomatoes than any set of humans can eat, and Trish provided us with (required we take) a pint of some good ones when we left. She also had approximately one gazillion jars of delicious homemade pickles in the fridge, which we were happy to help eat.

Their toddler-age daughter Kyla is following in her mother’s culinary footsteps, and at the time of our visit was baking a “cake” in the living room. Sure, it was made of straws and popsicle sticks, but we’re confident the cake is going to turn out great. At least once it’s finished baking – Kyla had been preventing anyone from touching it, or even going near it, for the previous several months.

Side note: the cake is in the exact center of the living room.

Four Score and Several Months Ago

We didn’t have much time to spend in the Dover area, but we did take a short drive down to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to explore some history for a day. We really enjoyed it. The new national museum at Gettysburg is a top-notch facility, featuring a gajillion artifacts from the battle, along with a film narrated by Morgan Freeman. He should really narrate everything.

Our favorite part was the “Cyclorama” – a gigantic, 360-degree painting of the Battle of Gettysburg. You stand inside of the Cyclorama on a raised platform, while they make sound effects and flashing lights to simulate musket fire. It sounds much cheesier than it is. The painting is beautiful, and tremendously, extraordinarily detailed; it’s the sort of thing you can stare at for a month and still find something new.

Apparently this style of painting used to be all the rage in the late 1800s, before there were movies and television sets and iPads. On the one hand, it’s hard not to feel a certain nostalgia for the “simpler” days of giant circular paintings that take four years to create; on the other hand, you can’t even play Angry Birds on it, so, you know. Kind of useless.

We also enjoyed the museum itself. It was full of lots of interesting quotations, many along the lines of, “Yes, the Civil War was in fact about slavery.” The negative reviews of the Gettysburg Address were also pretty entertaining:

Not everyone was a fan of the Gettysburg Address, apparently.

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on Sep 10, 2015 at 11:34am PDT

We also drove around the town and Gettysburg battlefield. It’s definitely cool to stand in the same fields and hills where the battle took place, and the battlefield is absolutely studded with monuments to every group that fought there, both Union and Confederate. There is something hard to capture about the experience. “Pickett’s Charge” is famous as a heroic, doomed infantry march, but we couldn’t really understand it until we stood where it happened.

Turns out the Confederate army just walked across a mile-long, empty field, directly into the teeth of Union defenses and cannon fire. “Charge” is misleading, since they weren’t even running (!), and it worked out about as well as you might expect. Which is to say, the Confederate army was utterly crushed.

Next time, maybe a light jog would be in order?

LAST BITS

What’s next: Currently, we are still at Jake’s mom’s house in El Paso, Texas. We replaced the floor of our RV! We’re working on the counters, faucets, and sinks next.

Shamefully missed a prior post? We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.

Next Post: Week 11.5: The Greenbelt in the Beltway

October 28, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 9.5: Taking Vermont In

We had such a good time in New Hampshire’s White Mountains that we decided to head to Vermont’s Green Mountains next, in the southwestern corner of the state. Whereas the White Mountains felt remote, the Green Mountains were merely quiet, with working cell towers and a demographic best described as “technocratic hippie brewers.” It was as delightful as that sounds (at least to us), and there was even a tiny house manufacturer right outside our campground!

The campground we stayed at was run by the US Army Corps of Engineers, which is kind of cool, but the campground was really just a giant field with RVs parked in it. A nicely manicured, well maintained field, but a field nonetheless, and it offered zero privacy from our neighbors.

During our stay, we decided to do some RV maintenance; namely, checking out the condition of the roof, and sealing some small cracks along a few wall seams with silicon. While Jake was outside prepping, he was approached by one of our older neighbors, and had our first conversation with a seasoned, full time RVer! He told us about the stuff we should have bought for the cracks, and then just started listing all of his ailments and their accompanying medical treatment (this was lengthy). Overall the conversation was a 10/10; would have again.

Although, as introverts, of course we haven’t.

West River Trail

After accomplishing “interact with another camper,” it seemed like a good time to go on a quiet hike. And it was quiet; we only ran into one other person during the three hours we were hiking. The hike was on the West River Trail, which follows, you guessed it, the West River.

The hike was beautiful,with a rocky river, colorful meadows, and, as advertised, green mountains. We also saw some of the first signs on autumn on a few trees.

The trial was flanked by insanely tall pine trees, which we tried to capture in the picture below. Deep into the woods, we also spotted a wild barrel, far from its natural habitat.

Jake went in to investigate the barrel closer. It was labeled “gasoline,” but all we could think of was the below clip from the Simpsons. Now, we’re not saying that a leaking toxic barrel is the reason that the trees are so tall, but we will say that the closest nuclear power plant is only about 40 miles away.

No laser-eyed squirrels were seen on our hike, unfortunately. Also, we learned how to make gifs!

After contemplating the contents of the barrel, we continued on our hike to Angel Falls, where we stopped to have a little picnic before heading back to the campground.

Mmm… Beer

We spent our final day in Vermont exploring the nearby town of Manchester. Manchester is a cute, historic town near the Bromley and Stratton Ski Resorts, and it was full of shops and restaurants wishing desperately that it was tourist season. Since we are suckers for clever names, we stopped for some appetizers and drinks at The Other Woman Tavern, directly above The Perfect Wife Restaurant. They had a delicious Hot Indian Curry and Goat Cheese Dip with eggplant fries, which really hit the spot for our Indian food craving. (God, we miss you Bhatti!)

They also had a special beer by Long Trail, only available at this restaurant, called “That’s What She Said.”

Relaxing with Long Trail’s “That’s What She Said” beer at The Other Woman Tavern (amusingly adjacent to The Perfect Wife Restaurant). What a mouthful!

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on Aug 31, 2015 at 3:13pm PDT

It certainly left us satisfied and smiling.

Every That’s What She Said from The Office from TheOfficeisms on Vimeo.

After leaving Manchester, we made a quick stop at Grandma Miller’s Pies, and by quick stop we mean Heather abruptly turned in as soon as she saw the sign like she was in a Cathy cartoon. After filling up with strawberry rhubarb pies and peanut butter squares, we headed back to the campground to prepare for our next stop, New York City and the Deep Wilds of New Jersey.

LAST BITS

What’s next: Currently, we are on our last night in Marfa, Texas, looking at art and recovering from a beautiful but dehydrating trip to Big Bend National Park. Tomorrow we head to El Paso, where we’ll be for a while.

Shamefully missed a prior post? We love you anyway.

Next Post: Week 10: Hitting the Brakes in New York & New Jersey

September 14, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 7: Cape Cod – It’s Gonna Rain

Hi friends! We’ve got a shiny new blog post for you. We know, we know, you weren’t expecting one for another week, at least, but we were so ~~bored~~ excited to share that we decided to ship one out early. Alternatively, we realized that our backlog has grown so large that we need to do at least two posts a week in order to have any hope of finishing this decade. So, no more excuses and no more procrastination. Time to strap on our blog helmets, buckle down our blog seatbelts, and blast off into the… blogosphere, we guess.

Hmm. That’s an annoying word, blogosphere. Really, just the word “blog” is so aurally displeasing. It’s a real earsore. Maybe we should be blasting off into the “chatmosphere”? That’s pretty fun, although this is not really a chat, more of a monologue. And if we’re being honest, it’s getting fairly stream of consciousness here, so maybe we’re having more of a ramble than a monologue. Ramblosphere doesn’t quite work, though – just seems like an atmosphere full of Rambos, just shooting and yelling and revisioning history, which is not at all the tone we’re looking for. It would probably make for a pretty sweet movie, though.

Wait, what were we talking about again? Oh right! Post. Here you go, fresh from the ramblosphere.

Scusset Beach

After our stunning success at purchasing a car in Rhode Island, we headed to Scusset Beach State Reservation, which is a Massachusetts state park located on the ocean near the very beginning of Cape Cod. As the name implies, there is a beach at Scusset, and enterprising and extremely foolhardy RV-ers can actually park and stay overnight on the sand if they so choose. That did not seem like a great plan to us, because of things like “no traction” and “high tide” and “sand freaking everywhere,” so we stayed slightly inland.

Scusset was recently renovated and was definitely a good deal, but here’s a full list of the weather patterns we experienced there:

Rain

And here’s a list of the activities we were able to take part in at Scusset:

Looking at the rain
Listening to the rain
Getting rained on
Waiting for it to stop raining

There was one brief period when we arrived during which the rain paused, and we headed to the beach to check out the scene. Although there were almost no humans there, we saw quite a few seagulls, who were taking advantage of the stiff incoming breeze to hover in place over the sand. Check out this vine:

Hover birds! We also took a few photos while it was not actively raining:

Cape Cod: Great Island Trail Death March

Hoverbirds aside, Scusset was a bit of a bust, so we decided to drive out along Cape Cod. Along the way, we went for a hike at Great Island Trail, a highly regarded national park in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The scenery was as pretty as advertised, with beautiful ocean views, an interior forest, and windswept grasses which looked almost like sand dunes.

Unfortunately, the day turned out to be extraordinarily hot. What’s worse, the trail took us primarily over very loose sand dunes, and hiking on sand (while wearing shoes) is not a whole lot of fun. It was rough. The back end of the hike was about 2.5 miles along the beach, under a blazing sun and over constantly shifting sand, until we were too tired to even complain properly. But we did snap some photos! Enjoy them in an air conditioned room with a cold beverage, for our sakes.

Cape Cod: Provincetown

Directly after our hike, we stopped to grab some ice cream (side note: we have eaten more ice cream in the last two months than in the previous two years), then headed up to Provincetown, which is at the very tip of Cape Cod. Provincetown is a very lively town with a culture best described as “rainbow,” and the weather had finally cooled down enough to enjoy it. We walked through the main drag and had a great dinner at The Lobster Pot, a P-town institution Jake remembered from a visit with his family as a kid. We even got to snap some pics of the sunset from the Lobster Pot’s deck during dinner.

A photo posted by @nothingmundane on Aug 10, 2015 at 3:44pm PDT

Plymouth

Our final activity while staying at Scusset was a visit to Plymouth, Massachusetts, home of the fabled Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock is the alleged spot where the Pilgrims first landed, and it’s an intensely boring landmark in person. It’s just a medium-sized rock with a date carved into it, surrounded by walls so that future generations can also be disappointed by it.

Luckily, we were prepared for this possibility, and had scoped out things to do in Plymouth before we landed there. We ended up walking around the town, which is fairly cute, seeing some semi-historic sculptures, and buying some delicious beer at an awesome craft beer store. We also ate some roasted cauliflower at a local gastropub, which looked suspiciously like brains. (The cauliflower, not the restaurant.) If you want to imagine this all occurring in a montage, we won’t stop you.

What’s next: Currently, we are in a campground near Washington, D.C., at which we have seen roughly equal amounts of people and deer. Next up: monuments, museums, and Richmond, Virginia.

Shamefully missed a prior update? You can catch up below, but please note that this is being marked in your permanent file.

Next Post: Spamalot

July 31, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 3.5: A Casino, An Art Park & A Lake

Howdy folks! We slipped on our posting schedule a bit and now have a backlog of travels to get through, so here’s a heads up that this is going to be a longer post. Lucky you!

A Casino

When we last wrote, we were in the magical hobbit land of Watkins Glen State Park, which we left to spend a night at the (theoretically) magical gambling land of Turning Stone Casino, in upstate New York. Turning Stone actually has a fantastic RV Park, which just so happens to offer free shuttles to the casino. For some reason, they seem to want to attract well-to-do elderly folks with plenty of stuff in their car to pawn as necessary.

Now, we may not be elderly or particularly well-to-do, but we’re always willing to take a free shuttle bus ride. So, showing the same business acumen that lead to quitting our career track jobs in NYC to buy an RV, we got dressed to the nines on a Wednesday night and headed in. It turned out the core demographic was more “sweatpants-wearing chain-smoker and problem gambler” than “swanky cocktail party,” but hey, we didn’t go on this trip just to play by everyone else’s rules.

And friends, once we made it in, we hit it big. As in, we made enough money from playing our favorite slot machine (Kitty Glitter) with our $10 voucher that we nearly covered the cost of tipping the driver for the free shuttle bus ride! Of course, we also paid for a nice dinner there, but whatever – gotta spend money to make money. It’s an investment.

An Art Park

After collecting and then immediately disgorging our winnings, we headed to Albany to visit Jake’s Grandmother and Aunt. Along the way, we decided to make what turned out to be a not-so-quick stop in Cazenovia, New York to check out Stone Quarry Hill Art Park. We didn’t know about it before it popped up in one of our “things to do” apps, but it turned out it was recognized as #2 in National Geographic’s “Top Ten Sculpture Parks and Trails.” The park was only about 30 terrifying minutes away by motorhome over small mountain roads, and it was definitely worth the trip.

The park was created over decades by Dorothy and Bob Riester at their summer home, and currently is home to several artists in residence. The park is huge, beautifully maintained, and completely open to the public ($5 suggested donation). Cool, funky sculptures are sprinkled throughout the park, accessible by carefully cultivated paths through forests and tall grasses. We were there for several hours and only got a taste of the park, but what we saw was pretty extraordinary. We would highly recommend anyone in the area take a look, or just follow along with our captioned tour below.

A Lake

After the art park, we made it to Albany and took a boat ride on Lake George in upstate New York. We went with Jake’s father, aunt, and grandmother, and spent the entire time hanging out at one end of the boat because they had a DJ (why??) and that DJ was incredibly, almost aggressively terrible (again, why??).

Luckily, they served beer, so everything worked out in the end. Below are some photos.

While we were in Albany we also got to play with these guys and test out our skills at photographing animals. We don’t think it is necessary to say just how many other photos we took trying to get a good picture of these energetic pups. So we’ll just say hooray for digital film!

What’s next: Currently, we are in Connecticut near Hopeville Pond State Park, honing our profound hatred of mosquitoes. Tomorrow, we’re going to spend the night at Mohegan Sun Casino – we’re coming for you, Kitty Glitter! We’re then spending a week in Rhode Island at a private RV park to try to get this website in better shape.

If you like what you see, we would be very grateful if you could share with your friends. Friendship is fun!

Previous Post: Week 3: Watkins Glen is Magic

Next Post: Weeks 4-5: You Connect, I Cut

July 20, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 3: Watkins Glen is Magic

To start off Week 3 of our roadtrip, we spent 3 nights camping at Watkins Glen State Park. Watkins Glen is a jewel of a park located about 30 miles west of Ithaca, NY, where we stayed in Week 2. It is rated #3 on USA Today’s list of Best State Parks in the United States, and it totally rocks.

Watkins Glen seems like the sort of park that hobbits would build, with a hiking trail that wanders through a beautiful, steep-sided gorge, handcut stone walls and bridges, sparkling waterfalls, and even a lily pond. The trail is cut into the walls of the gorge itself, and it goes much closer to the water than you normally can at these kinds of parks. Possibly this is because the park was first built in the 1860s, before we had the word “safety.” (As you will see in our photos, the park also features what can only be described as a “pre-ADA number of stairs.”)

Whatever the reason, the park is frankly breathtaking. Rather than try to describe it further, just look below at some of the many, many pictures “we” (OK, Heather) took at the park. There are captions on some of them if you click through the gallery. Keep reading after the gallery for a few bonus pictures and some shameless self promotion.

Bonus stuff: The campground at Watkins Glen State Park was fantastic, with generous camping sites nestled beneath gigantic trees. Our neighbors were slightly insane, but aside from that, it was as good as it gets.

After hiking, Jake successfully made a “fire,” cementing his place as one of history’s greatest heroes and outdoorsman. We made s’mores and high-fived ourselves for going on this trip.

On our last night in Watkins Glen, a huge thunderstorm was forecast to hit us dead-on, but luckily just missed to the south. This was good, since the lightning we could see from our window was enough to scare anyone.

Following the storm, the sky – which, at 6 o’clock on a bright summer day, had gone almost as dark as night – lightened into an amazing sunset. Heather endured many, many mosquito bites to photograph it for you, so be sure to feel appropriately appreciative.

What’s next: We’ve had a few adventures since Watkins Glen which we’re going to write about separately, including trips to a ridiculously cool sculpture park and Lake George. Currently, we are in Connecticut near Black Rock State Park, where it is rocky and extremely hot. Later this week, we’re traveling to Hammonasset State Park to get our beach on.

If we get ten more followers, we’ll buy one of you a puppy! So, please check for packages regularly.

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