We returned from Lake Placid this afternoon, having spent three days where Uncas, and Chingachgook, and Natty Bumppo once walked in James Fenimore Cooper's very active but overly wordy imagination. It's still great here, even though there's a Gap Outlet, where Pathfinder once found paths and Deerslayer once slew deer.
We stayed at the Golden Arrow Hotel right on Mirror Lake. It's a really nice place with great hospitaliy, and we've been there so often they gave us a gift bag upon arrival. It contained water, granola bars, two coin shaped chocolates wrapped in gold foil, some stationery, and a souvenir coaster made of Adirondack wood. All in all, very thoughtful.
It was a big biker weekend in the mountains. Harleys roared through the high peaks. Quite a few bikers stayed where we stayed, but not your Hell's Angel variety. Our biker couples arrived on gorgeous tricycle Harleys that pulled little trailers for their clothes. When they removed their helmets and leather, many of our bikers emerged as apparently well-to-do senior citizens wearing Ralph Lauren and Armani and Prada and stuff. Very nice folks. One carried a copy of Kamus under his arm, perhaps to suggest that he was not only "biker" hip but intellectual hip as well. I didn't tell him that Kamus is a little dated.
I had wanted to make a couple more points about the SU game from last Saturday. The first involves the new t-shirts being sported by the students and fans. One style suggests "A New Beginning" is upon us. We'll have to see about that one. Another, popular with upperclassmen, announces that like Prada, "The Devil Wears Orange." My favorite t-shirt, though, was the one given to every freshman. On the front was a picture of a little house with an arrow leading from it to a tiny likeness of the Carrier Dome. Below it were the words "Home to Dome." On the back it announced that he or she was a member of the SU Class of 2013. The freshmen don't get to sit in the large student section, instead they are sent to the upper reaches of the dome all over the stadium. A bunch sat behind where I was sitting and they all wore their Home to Dome Shirts. Some freshman seemed very confident, and at ease. A few girls had even seductively torn their new t's so they could let them drape suggestively over one shoulder and half a cleavage. I appreciated the frightened ones, though. It was their first football game, and they looked like deer caught in the headlights. And God bless 'em, a lot of the scared ones had their backpacks with them. Just like ninth graders, they appeared to be afraid to put them down. I get a kick out of that kind of innocence.
I also saw three people there who I hadn't seen in a while. First, I saw Dave Cooke, who used to teach math at Chittenango. I remember when he and his wife Melissa had baby Madison. Madison is 10 or 11 now, and Dave has gray hair. Then I saw Mike Sandore. Having been briefly retired, Mike has taken a job as principal at Notre Dame/Bishop Gibbons School in Schenectady. It's a 6-12 school with only 300 kids. He and his wife have rented an apartment in Schenectady but are keeping their house here, too. And finally, I saw Ellen Pollock and her mom, and Ellen told me she's going to SUNY Binghamton to get her masters in English Education. That's great news. Education needs great people like Ellen.
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