A Day off at Lake Placid!

Paul took the day off from work and we went to Lake Placid for the day! We had a nice time - pretty drive, beautiful day, nice scenery and a nice little town. And yarn of course.

We started off the day at two different Dunkin' Donuts... we had a coupon for the new waffle breakfast sandwiches, but the first DD was out of bacon and eggs. Go figure. The next one had what we wanted and they were pretty tasty. Interesting, but tasty. Then we finally got on the road, me with my knitting...

and Paul driving. Every now and then he'd say, "There's a pretty shot." and I'd quickly put the knitting down, turn on the camera and snap a picture. Here are some of the pretty scenes on the way up...

Oops, just realized there's only one! I forgot that I decided putting too many would be boring. So, lots of scenes like this - so pretty and nice to get out of the city. Then we finally saw this...

Yay! But we were still about 40 minutes away. We wound our way up and down the mountains on what seemed like a very narrow road with a lot of holiday traffic, our ears popping with the altitude changes. We saw lots of these ice flows on the rocks...

If you look really really really closely toward the right side of the picture, you'll see some people ice climbing. We kept passing groups of cars on the side of the road but couldn't see any marked walking paths or anything. Finally we spotted people actually climbing up the ice. Looked scary.

Paul knew we were getting close when we saw this:

I had no idea what it was. It looked like one of those grain elevator things you see going up to a silo on a farm, without a silo. It was the ski jumping thing-y. Not sure what it's called. But it's very high. I couldn't get a picture on the other side where they land but it looked very close to the road!

FINALLY, we got to the town...

It was:

Our first stop was, of course, a yarn shop! Adirondack Yarns (50 Saranac Ave., Lake Placid; www.adirondackyarns.com).

I met the owner, Susan, who was very nice and we talked shop for a while. Paul held my yarn. I got a very nice alpaca/wool blend (gee, did you really think I'd come back WITHOUT alpaca?) by Catalina (worsted and chunky) and some roving (blue face leicester) to practice my spinning:

The chunky Catalina is very much like the Baby Alpaca Grande by Plymouth , but it has wool in it, so that helps it to keep it's shape. Susan had an Einstein coat made up in the 100% Alpaca version that Catalina also has - VERY tempting. The Einstein coat is on my short list of projects and I've been trying to figure out a yarn to knit it with. (She has had it hanging in the shop for about 5 years and says it really hasn't stretched out that much.)

Then it was off to lunch at a place called Jimmy's 21 and this was our view while we ate:

That's Mirror Lake and we saw all kinds of activities going on down there. People walking, skating, getting dog sled rides...

We walked around town for a little while and it seemed that no one but us was walking on the "right" side of the side walk. Seriously. We kept having to stop because people were walking right toward us on "our" side of the sidewalk. And being oblivious because they were looking in shop windows. It was really kind of strange and we began to think maybe we were not aware of some sort of rule about how to walk on the sidewalks up there.

Since we saw so many of them outside various stores, had to take a picture of a bobsled:

And a picture of the Olympic Center:

And our customary picture, taken by me:

We also stopped to get some homemade chocolates and, despite the 23 degree weather, ice cream at Ben and Jerry's (we just love ice cream).

That topped off the day and we made our way home. It was a nice treat to have a whole day together!