After six-and-a-half weeks in Canada, we left Niagara Falls, Ontario and crossed the border back into to the US near Buffalo on July 20. There was a 20 minute waiting line at the border, but once we reached the immigration/customs agent, we were cleared to go in less than two minutes.
Our first destination was the Finger Lakes region of New York. There are 11 Finger Lakes, and on the map it looks like a tiger raked its claws across the middle of New York State. The lakes were dug out by glaciers during the Ice Age. We stayed near the north end of Canandaigua Lake.
The Erie Canal runs across the state just north of the Finger Lakes, so we spent one of our days in the area biking about 22 miles on the towpath next to the Canal. The Canal is still actively used by recreational boaters, and we passed by one of its 35 locks. We had lunch in the cute town of Fairport right on the canal.
On our return journey, we watched a line of canal boats returning to their port. Friends of ours had rented a boat for a five-day trip on the Canal the year before and we'd thought of doing the same. However, by the time we checked they were fully booked for the 2022 season. Perhaps in a future year...
The next day, we took a two hour sail on Lake Canandaigua with Daydream Sailing. It was just the two of us, Captain Brenda (the boat's owner), and crewmate Emmett to help with the sails. There was a nice wind, and Captain Brenda gave us both a chance at the tiller and allowed us to tack back and forth. A relaxing morning sail in beautiful weather.
We left the Finger Lakes on a two-day drive to the Berkshires, the mountain area of western Massachusetts. Before reaching our campground in Easthampton (which is next to Northampton and Westhampton - there are lots of "...hamptons" in that part of Massachusetts) we stopped at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
The museum has many of Rockwell's iconic paintings, such as his Four Freedoms set, self portrait, and Golden Rule.
There's a room displaying the 323 Saturday Evening Post covers his paintings adorned over a 30 year period.
One interesting thing we learned was that the Post only allowed African-Americans to be shown in subservient roles, like the one below.
After Rockwell ended his relationship with the Post, he devoted much of his work to civil rights themes.
We also visited Rockwell's studio, which had been moved from downtown Stockbridge to the museum grounds in the 1990s. The docent pointed out that Rockwell was a total neatnik, which you can see by looking at his squeaky clean brushes and organized paints.
During our time in the Berkshires, we spent a day with one of Doug's business school classmates (and published author of multiple historical romances), Linda Cardillo and her husband Stephen Platzer.
They showed us all around their beautiful historic town of Longmeadow. We also visited the local bird sanctuary (where we saw a bald eagle). After a delicious dinner (Linda, like Jeannette, comes from an Italian background - where the watchword is "mangia, mangia, mangia"), we took our dessert on the road and sat by the Connecticut River enjoying the sunset.
The next day, we drove to Skinner State Park and to the top of Mount Holyoke which offers an expansive view of the Connecticut Valley below. There's an old hotel (Summit House) on the mountaintop although it was not open for tours during the week.
We ate a delicious Mexican dinner in the nearby town of Northampton (where Smith College is located) and drank a latte listening to a jazz quartet in a street that had been turned into an outdoor park for the summer.
On our last day in the area, we biked 22 miles on the Norwottuck Rail Trail which goes through several college towns in the area.
Leaving the Berkshires, we headed back to Newport, Rhode Island (which we'd visited earlier in our trip) to spend two days at the Newport Jazz Festival. It's held at Fort Adams State Park (the fort protected the harbor in the 19th and 20th centuries), a beautiful location where one of the artists shared, "This is the only festival where the artists have a better view than the audience!".
Newport is the oldest jazz festival in the country and was held first in in 1954. George Wein, the festival's founder, also helped found the Newport Folk Festival and the New Orleans Jazz Festival, and passed away in his 90s just last September.
This was our first time attending a music festival like this. There are three stages and the 45 minute sets have overlapping start times, so you can't see everything. We found that we would start with one artist and, if we didn't like them, move on to another stage. We saw a wide variety of performances, from classic jazz, to rhythm and blues, to new age piano, to Dixieland, to Afro-fusion.
We also caught up with Jeannette's cousin Bill Melone, who hosts a weekly jazz program for the University of Rhode Island campus radio station and was manning the WRIU booth at the festival.
Before heading home, we spent two days driving back into New York and settled at a KOA near the town of Watkins Glen at the south end of Seneca Lake, another Finger Lake (east of Lake Canandaigua).
After biking on a local rail trail the day of our arrival, we spent the next day at Watkins Glen State Park, the area's main draw and one which gets almost one million visitors every year. Since the temperature was in the 90s, we opted to take a shuttle to the top of the gorge and then walk down the 1.5 miles and 800 stone steps of the trail, rather than making a round trip hike.
Glen Creek has cut through the hundreds of feet of rock just since the last Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago. The rock itself was formed through sedimentation some 350 million years ago.
Walking the trail and steps created by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s takes you first along a flat area, then down through the narrow gorge past 19 waterfalls, some of which you can walk behind.
The following day was hot and thunderstorm-laden, so we hung around the RV and began organizing ourselves for unloading the rig after we arrived home. Toward the end of the day, the storms finally passed, and we drove to a state park halfway up Seneca Lake to take in the sunset. The lake is bigger, longer, and wider than Lake Canandaigua.
It was finally time for us to return home. Leaving the KOA, we first drove 20 minutes to Corning, NY and spent part of the day at the Corning Museum of Glass. We'd last visited the museum in 2018 on our very first Ciaowagen trip (our leaf-peeper tour through New England), and though it worth revisiting.
We toured the ever-changing Contemporary Glass exhibition, which features glass works from around the world.
We also sat in on several demonstrations, including one about blowing glass and another about how glass breaks.
We're fans of "Blown Away" on Netflix. They were starting to set up an exhibit of works created by artists on the show, but it would not open till later in August.
We watched a final demo by an artist practicing flamework, a technique usually used to create scientific glass instruments where the artist works with a blowtorch and borosilicate glass. One of the museum guests had drawn a picture of a red octopus reading a newspaper (look at the video feed in the upper left of the first picture below), and the artist created that right before our eyes in about 30 minutes!
Leaving the museum, we headed straight south and drove through Pennsylvania and Maryland to our home in Annandale, Virginia, arriving about 9:30 at night..
It had been our shortest RV trip of the past four years (just under four months) but as fun and interesting as the others!
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