A Drive Through the Adirondacks

Today Brock was taking a vacation day so that we could leisurely drive through the Adirondack region of  New York and visit the Adirondack Museum. He was still doing his board checks first thing in the morning though. The kids and I decided to take off school for the day too. We didn't get checked out of our campground until about 11 am though since everything always takes longer than we anticipate.

Once we finally got our show on the road, we drove straight through to the museum without stopping. The skies were gray and there was a little drizzle hear and there, but nothing too distracting. Almost as soon as we crossed the threshold of the park, the Welcome to the Adirondacks sign, the scenery became glorious. Overwhelming me several times. I would just say Oh! over and over again. My eyes even welled up with tears a few times as I just couldn't take it all in. Our God is so creative and artistic! The beauty was just indescribable. I don't know if the experts call this "peak" foliage viewing season or not, but it sure was amazing to us.

We didn't end up getting to the museum until after 1:30 pm and it closes at 5 pm and we still hadn't had lunch, so we quickly scarfed down peanut butter and honey sandwiches and hurried up to pay our admission and get going. The museum has several buildings to tour. The first one that we spent time in was a recreation exhibit with lots of hands-on things for the kids to try. We also saw the exhibits on logging, cabins that had rustic furniture displays, a train, old schoolhouse, and a boat museum. We could've spent much more time at each of the exhibits, but we did fit a lot in in the time we had. The kids seemed to enjoy the old schoolhouse quite a bit where they got to try writing on the old slates and playing some old time games like hoop rolling and stilts. Spencer really wanted to do a craft at the schoolhouse, but we only had about a half hour until closing so we hurried him along so we wouldn't miss seeing the boat museum. It was really cool with many samples of canoes that have been designed, built and refined over time. Some of them were really beautiful.

As we left the museum, there was more oohing and aahing over the scenery. There is just a ton of little lakes and really picturesque spots. We didn't stop for too many pics because the roads are pretty narrow and winding and it seemed to get pretty bumpy from that point on. About 6 pm, we were starting to feel a little bit of pressure to figure out where we were stopping for the night. I just kept aching over not wanting to do any of the drive in the dark. I felt like we were missing stuff (and I know we totally were)! BUT, there just weren't many options for camping that we felt would accommodate us. We ended up driving around the tip of Lake Champlain in the dark and crossing the bridge into Vermont. We couldn't really tell if a campground was going to be ok to even pull into in the dark so we passed a couple by. We were heading to one that we thought was going to be ok and I didn't have any cell coverage to try to look up a review on it and so we just plugged it into the gps and started heading there, but as we got within a couple of miles, I got service and looked up the Google reviews and they were terrible. SO, we decided to keep going to the next one. We got close to that one and Brock noticed the brakes were feeling squishy on the Yukon and he felt we needed to check it out so we pulled over and he found that the trailer electrical plug had jiggled loose so he got that pushed back tight and everything was working much better. I tried calling the campground and got a recording, but we decided to try it anyways. When we pulled in, the office was closed and there was no signage about after hours check-ins so we didn't know what to do. The park felt much more like it was for long-term residents than for us. The only problem was that we couldn't see the loop of the road and didn't know if there was anything obstructing it for us. After a little back and forth, since we couldn't really back up, we decided to chance it and we drove around the loop. It was a little tight, but we made it through and decided to just head for a WalMart to get some sleep.

We called the WalMart and checked with the manager to make sure that they allowed overnight parking and they did. Phew! So we drove about 15 minutes to the WalMart and got parked. The crazy thing was that we'd not eaten dinner yet and neither had Heidi. She was pretty patient, but her mouth kept salivating all on its own. We had some chicken noodle soup really quick and everybody got to bed between 10:30 and 11 pm. The last bit of the day had been a little stressful and rather tiring so I don't think it took any of us long to fall asleep.