Trip to western NY

Last week, we drove up into western NY to visit my brother Tom and sister-in-law Peggy who live in Bath,  the town I grew up in.  I go up every summer to see them and touch base with high school friends.  Kate had not been up there since she moved to England.  We got really lucky on the weather.  It was warm, not hot, and sunny every day.  Usually when I visit Bath, I get at least one rainy day, sometimes more.  We did get rain, but it fell at night, so we had wonderful days to do outdoor things.

We visited Stony Brook State Park one day.  It has a long steep glen with several small waterfalls.  The swimming pool that I remembered from my youth was no longer there, but there were shallow pools of water in many places and everyone was wading and paddling in them.  The kids had a great time getting wet, of course.  Kate and I just waded a bit.  The water was cold, but that never stops kids.  We hiked up the glen to the top, by which time, my legs were quite sore from climbing all the stairs.  We had brought a picnic lunch, which we ate at the park, then headed back to Bath.

Another day we went to Corning to visit the glass museum and a small museum that has Native American paintings and sculpture. Most of the works are by famous painters from the 1800s, who went West to paint Indians.  The modern works were by Native Americans themselves.  I love the stuff by Remington and others who painted realistically, scenery as well as Indians.   We couldn't use flash in the Rockwell, so photos of that are poor.  However, I have many pictures from the glass museum.  I love glass, almost as much as I love ceramics!  I have a small collection of art glass, but mostly not from Corning.  The things made there are rather pricey!  We saw the glass show, where they demonstrate blowing glass.  Years ago, one could look down into the factory where the blowers were working and also watch the men etching Steuben ware.  Can't do that these days.  However, the museum is very child friendly and offers various activities for kids.  It was a good place for the family to go.

Bath is the County Seat of Steuben County, so every year it hosts the county fair.  When I was a child, we lived just three houses from the fairgrounds entrance.  I thought this was great, of course.  My parents, however, probably wished they lived much further away.  Cars would park on our street and sometimes block our driveway.  (Now the police put up no parking signs on all nearby streets.)  The worst part of living near the Fair was the noise.  They used to have a motorcycle show near the entrance.  This was a huge cylinder shaped building.  The motorcycles would gather speed going round and round on the floor and then ride up the walls!  The noise of the bikes was bad enough, but a couple of years they added lions to the act.  The lions stayed on the floor on the arena and just prowled around and roared at the bikes.  At night, however, the lions roared even more and all the dogs in our neighborhood would bark and howl in response.  You can imagine what that did to the sleeping pattern of occupants of nearby homes.  Sadly (or happily), the motorcycles and lions are no longer part of the Fair.

Bath is near one of the Finger Lakes (Keuka), so we drove over to the lake and a town at the foot of the lake.  Hammondsport is a tourist town.  It has a lovely park in the center of town, with stores on two sides.  Antiques, knickknacks, pottery, fabric, paintings, food and homemade ice cream are all available.  There was also a craft show last weekend - very nice selection of crafts.  I bought a vase and the girls bought some jewelry.  The kids also swam in the lake.  My niece Terry was kind enough to swim with them, while Kate and I shopped at the craft show.