The post Labor Day period has always been my most favorite time of year. And depending on how the weather holds out, it can last all the way into December. Two years ago the boys and I were climbing to the tops of mountains in the Adirondacks on Thanksgiving day. Due to the elevation change, we found ourselves doing a lot of ice climbing, but even so it was still light jacket weather at the top of the mountain. So I do love this time a year.

So since my last blog here on my webpage, I have published 3 videos. My visit to the Flight 93 National Memorial, my Gondola ride up to the top of little Whiteface Mountain, and my Review of the Wilmington Notch Campground. If you haven’t already seen those just click on the title and you should be taken to the YouTube video. But let’s start off reviewing the videos and giving you a little background information on each one.

I visited the Flight 93 National Memorial while at the Aliner Rally and Factory Tour down in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The rally master, Dave Michaels, suggested that it was a memorable memorial to visit. He had recommended it even though he had seen it 2 years earlier before it was finished. I believe the visitor center was still under construction, so he did not see all the story lines and news media video that they now have in there. So when I got there I was quite impressed with all the stuff they had put together in a very factual and detailed way. There wasn’t any real fluff or great monument to any particular person or action anybody had done, it was just a telling of the story on how and why the plane crashed on the day of 9/11. It really is a pretty moving Memorial with all the newscasts and air traffic control tower conversations that they have. And while I’m told it does get a fairly steady stream of people, everybody seems to be very respectful that it is a MEMORIAL, not a park. Though there are places to have a picnic, they are away from the main Memorial and visitor center. The map that they had up in the visitor center indicated there was more stuff that they were planning on building on the site. That included a giant set of wind chimes set on a little rise quite a ways from the actual Memorial. And since the wind blows gently most of the time over the hill where the plane crashed, that will be quite an interesting addition to the whole Memorial. I hope if you ever get into that area of Pennsylvania, you make the stop to show your respect to those people that lost their lives stopping a terrorist plane from crashing into something to hurt our country.

I went up to Lake Placid with the idea of getting an “Olympic Passport”, which would get me into all the Olympic areas and let me do a video of all the Olympic events that you can experience during the summer. I had done a video about some of the Winter Olympic Areas in Winter, but they don’t allow you to actually participate in the activities.  Athletes are using them to train. So a summer video was called for. Unfortunately the camping reservations I had for this particular weekend turned out to be a complete fail. For one it rained most of Friday and all of Saturday. It was extremely cold (in the 40s and 50s). And they were holding the half Ironman 70.3 race on Sunday. So there were race restrictions on almost all of the venues. So I scrapped the idea of doing the Olympic passport event review, and just did the Wellington Notch campground review. The Wilmington Notch campground is right next to the Whiteface Mountain ski resort. We actually could have walked over to the ski resort and rode the gondola. But you have to cross a very rocky stream on a fairly steep hill to get there and I did not think that Caesar was up to making it. So we drove over when the rain broke for a little while on Saturday to see if we could ride the gondola up Sunday during the Ironman 70.3 race and we could play at the top of the mountain. Unfortunately they wouldn’t let the dogs on the gondola and they were closed during the Ironman 70.3 race. I’m not sure whose idea that was because it seems pretty stupid to be closed when there’s 2000 people out in front of your driveway looking for something to do while they wait for some family member or friend to come into the finish line 7 hours later. Oh well, so while I was talking to them about riding the gondola and taking the dogs and being turned down, I suggested maybe I could just put the camera on one of the gondola cars and let it take the ride up and back doing all the photography. After some scurrying around and some whispering back and forth they decided I could do that, which was very nice of them. So I hooked the GoPro onto the front window of one of the cars that nobody was in, and off it went for the 27 minute ride up and back. It wasn’t the best day because it was very foggy even at ground level, much less on top of the mountain. But it appears that it did get some decent video once it broke through the clouds and the wind blew the fog away below. I’m hoping to go back in a couple of weeks to see if I can ride it again during peak autumn colors. Then that would be a really nice video to remember the Adirondacks by.

And as a bonus discussion on my blog, for those that may not know it, I am leaving New York State and heading out in search of my fortune. I am selling my house and scrapping about 30% of my worldly goods, keeping just enough to outfit a small house if I choose to find one. But I doubt that I will be coming back in this direction for a very long time. I spent most of my life exploring the Adirondacks and various parts of New England. I love the Adirondacks, the Green Mountains, and the White Mountains.  They are some of the most marvelous natural areas on earth. They are incredibly friendly with out dangerous creatures or snakes or spiders or high hazards such as quicksand or forest fires. They have abundant places to camp and hike and even a phenomenal larder of wild foods if you know what to look for. So I have many reservations about leaving this area. But I have to put my fears and reservations aside and venture out on new explorations. I hope to continue to document a lot of it on YouTube and here on the blog, but I’m afraid that with cheap travel and lack of a good base to work from I might lag quite a bit in the beginning until I get the hang of it. So keep subscribing, and communicate back with me as you can, because I’ll need all the friends that I have and their guidance on my journey. And I will definitely try to keep everybody up on the antics of the boys and all the adventures we find.

Thank you, stay living life to the fullest.

Rick, Caesar, Dakota