I Love New York Travel

They are in there, somewhere. The hostas. Buried beneath a mound of weeds.

*sigh*

I used to have such pretty gardens. But flood after flood not only washed away my mulch, but filled my yard with greedy weeds, eager to take over everything. And they have. They are growing up so quickly that we’ll soon need a high school press box to view the yard from afar. Wow. LOTS of weeds this year.

We’re slowing re-cultivating everything. The vegetable garden comes first. Them the flower beds. This one is the newest bed, I made it only 2 years ago. I think I’m going to pluck out every weed and plant hostas in every square inch. That way, I won’t need mulch (which only flows away every time it rains hard/floods), and the leaves will shield young weeds from the sun. Sounds like a plan….

WOW!

It’s a wonderful thing when you find some photos you didn’t know you had.

The photo is from my son’s camera, when we hiked up Blue Mountain in the Adirondacks last September. It seems like a million miles away now. It would be SO COOL to make a photo like this into a huge wall mural or a tiny one into metal switch plate covers or something. The scene is just breathtaking.

I hope we can get back to the Adirondacks in the near future.

Photo taken last year from the King’s Garden at Fort Ticonderoga. It’s a nice break from the dull, gray and brown, rainy January outside my window.

The weather dudes just informed us that Lake Ontario is experiencing warmer than average temperatures. Lake Ontario fuels most of the the heavy “lake effect” snow that clobbers Upstate New York every winter. When cold air from Canada hit the warm water of Ontario, a roiling stew of snow develops. Some communities close to the lake and others inland but sitting along the wind currents get hit with tons of snow. Some towns get upwards of 10 feet in one storm. That’s a good storm. I am used to this kind of weather, so anything less than a foot of snow in a day is not really a storm to me. I know, some of you folks would be so freaked out if 5 or 10 feet of snow dropped on you, that you’d have to enter a residential rehab treatment facility! But I love the snow, especially the storms. Everything shuts down, no busy traffic.. it’s so beautiful and peaceful.

But today we have gray and brown. Hardly any snow at all this year. Although, with Ontario so warm… any cold current could change things very quickly. And we still have 2.5 months of winter left…

Another photo from our trip to Howe Caverns. This was my second favorite part of the tour (after the boat ride through the underground lake). The Winding Way, it’s called. It’s supposed to be the best example of water erosion in the world. It is indeed an amazing venture! And you do “wind” through the narrow passages. Some of the passages are so narrow that extremely large people or gals in maternity clothes because of pregnancy would not make it through. Some of the passages are very narrow indeed.

At one point, the husband stopped to hum in a portion of hollow stalactites. The sounds resonated throughout the entire winding way! It was very neat and all the others in the tour group were delighted. If you ever come to Upstate New York, you must see the caverns!