Travel: September 2005 Archives

When I first moved to New York, I heard the Adirondacks and Catskills thrown around with much abandon. Like most new New Yorkers, I assigned a vague cloud to the rest of New York State (besides Syracuse, which I knew was intensely cold and full of snow, and Saratoga Springs, whose quaint beauty I had already discovered). Recently, thanks to our friends with a car, we've been able to add shape to the cloud around the city and have found it to be anything but colorless. Our experiences have emboldened us, and this time, we took a trip to Lake Placid in a rental (which we got through Hotwire at JFK) to celebrate our one-year anniversary. We found the house, the Lake Placid Retreat on Craigslist and headed up there to explore the great outdoors. While we mostly took it easy, we embarked on a day hike to Cascade Mountain and Porter Mountain, and though it sapped every last ounce of hiking energy we had, the view and experience were amazing.