The Catskills

Joyce announced that she would like to go somewhere in the middle of August with the RV. We had nothing planned and gas prices were falling (around here). She found a KOA campground near Unadilla, New York and booked us for four nights.

August 20th

After breakfast, we grabbed the last of the food we were taking and our medications and hit the road. The distance was 180 miles with a lunch stop about half way to the camp. Most of the trip was along Route 17 which will become I-86 at some future date. Someone forgot to put rest areas along the road. The area we stopped at was 5 or 10 miles before we turned off Rt.17. The rest of the trip took about 40 minutes.

The Unadilla-I-88-Oneonta KOA campground was very nice and very small which added to its charm. The folks who run it were very helpful even to the point of offering to bring firewood from their home. The wood they had for sale was "green" and hard to light.

The weather was gorgeous for the five days we were away. It was cool during the first two days and started warming up as the days went by. Air conditioning or windows open during the day and heat at night. It was 50 degrees Thursday and Friday mornings.

August 21st

We went to the Hanford Mills Museum in East Meredith, NY. It was a 19th/20th century sawmill and grist mill run by a waterwheel and a water turbine. We had a guided tour of main building in which we were shown all the machinery and they cranked up the waterwheel and demonstrated how the ends of butter barrels were made. The barrel end was made up of two pieces of wood machined with a tongue on one part and a groove on the other, both cut using the power of the waterwheel. They were joined together without glue and turned into a circular barrel end. The mill could turn out 3600 of these a day.

The complex also had an office, the owner's home, a blacksmith shop, and an ice house which is still in use. Ice is cut out of the mill pond and placed in the ice house. Sawdust from the mill was then packed around the ice as insulation. It keeps this way until October.

August 22nd

Today, we headed up to Cooperstown to see the Baseball Hall of Fame. It was interesting and crowded. We had lunch in a basement restaurant across the street from the BHOF. The food and service were great as was the tab.

August 23nd

This afternoon, we took a ride down to Ashville, NY to see about the train ride we were planning on taking tomorrow. The big concern was if there would be parking for the RV with the car in tow. No problem. We took a tour of the SUNY Delhi campus. This is where I went to school. I recognized three or four buildings. Everything else was new. I found out that it is now a four year school.

August 24th

We had a leisurly breakfast, prepped for the trip home, and headed off to Ashville. The plan was to leave Pogo in the RV with the generator and air conditioning running. When I bought the tickets, I found that he could go with us on the train. He had gone with us to Monhegan Island last year on our Maine trip. The train ride was fun. We rode on a flat car set up with seats.

The trip home was long due to the heavy traffic on the NY Thruway.