Alexandria Bay

Many years ago I lived with a woman, to her eternal regret, who grew up in Alexandria Bay. I never got to visit the town with her, and in previous visits to New York State I have not managed to get there. I did finally, this week. 

We rolled north through rain and thick green forests such that by the time we arrived on the edge of the St Lawrence River the little tourist town was soaking wet.

Labor Day actually means something around here, unlike the Keys where September is high season for hurricanes.  Alexandria Bay is closed for the winter. 

I exaggerate but not by much. I walked Rusty for an hour and passed quite a few eateries closed for the winter. The Thousand Islands region is a summer destination for Canadians  on the north shore and Americans on this side. 

Wellesley Island faces Alexandria Bay and the border is just north of that but I saw Canadian flagged ferries weaving through the rocks and islands. I imagine in summer this place must be hopping. There is an odd symmetry between these islands and the Keys. This place became well known when President Grant was running for re-election in 1872 was invited for a visit by his friend George Pullman who had a home here. President Truman did similar advertising for the Keys. 

You may have heard of Thousand Island dressing. Like most popular stories this product comes with two creation myths. One, rather boring one is that a hotelier created it and the proof lies in the fact that they found an original recipe in the hotel safe in Clayton, New York and it is promoted by a local fishing guide. 

However there is a much better story and it goes like this. George Boldt and his wife Louise, whom he adored, were cruising the St Lawrence in their steam yacht one fine day. Their chef Oscar Tschirky found he had no salad dressing onboard so he quickly shipped up ketchup, mayo, pickle juice and egg and called it good. We call it Thousand Island. 

Aside from salad dressing Boldt is the big cheese in local history. He owned the Waldorf Astoria in New York City and he had money to burn. He discovered the area around 1893 and decided to build his wife a palace on a lump of rock. He bought the five acre Hart Island, as you do when you are that wealthy and hired 300 craftsmen to build a dream home to honor his wife.

She had the poor taste to die suddenly in 1904 before the mammoth task was completed and with a phone call the heart broken Boldt, who had renamed his fantasy Heart Island, called off the craftsmen who were plunged into unemployment just like that. 

The place was left to rot for three quarters of a century until the Thousand Islands Bridge Authority decided to salvage the wreck and rebuild it. And the work continues.

You can imagine the genteel elegance of that era when working people worked and the Gatsbys idled as you walk around Alexandria Bay. Plus there was the smuggling… just like the Keys where alcohol was smuggled across the Straits of Florida during Prohibition, so they smuggled madly here from Canada just across the river.  

One startling feature of the town is the supremely ugly hospital building on the hill. It’s a muddy brown block on top of the rise overlooking the river, prime real estate, and it is ugly! 

It has the added benefit of cutting off downtown from any possibility of a river view. The St Lawrence is Alexandria Bay’s lifeline but you wouldn’t know it downtown. Weird. 

But if you walk your dog,

You can find the river flowing past the town. 

We retreated to a nearby rest area for the night just off I-81which was surprisingly quiet at night. By day it’s packed with truck traffic to and from Canada over the Thousand Islands Bridge. 

We’ve driven Canada Highway 401 along the St Lawrence River previously  so we feel no pressing need to cross into Canada this trip. Our plan is to drive east to Lake Champlain and take the ferry to Burlington. Six miles is  as close as we need to be to this border because now at last I’ve seen the fabled Alexandria Bay. 

Lake Cayuga

Ithaca, Cicero, Scipio Center, Dryden, Geneva, Genoa, Hannibal. You might get the impression the first settlers had an interest in the classics judging by many of the names. Oswego refers to the original settlers of course. 

There is a series of long thin lakes pointing north to south known rather unimaginatively known as the Finger Lakes, best known to outsiders as the home decades ago as the site of winter Olympic Games. 

They are known for their beauty and we got more than one recommendation to pay a visit. So we did. 

Ithaca has a large waterfront park with free access and welcomes dogs so we saw no reason not to stop by. iOverlander also mentioned a water faucet and we were at half a tank so adding 15 gallons to fill her up seemed like a good idea. 

It was a lovely day and a couple of light showers weren’t enough to drive the sun away. 

We got the water as advertised and in town we bought four hand made cold water pastry pies. They are shaped like empanadas but are baked not fried. 

We got a Japanese curried beef pie each and I also had a potato pie while Layne predictably went for the jalapeño ( pictured below). 

There was a bakery offering sourdough with corn and cheddar bits. Using the Internet when you travel opens up a whole host of small business encounters. We drove north up the east shore of Lake Cayuga. 

Predictably enough the water disappeared from view and we found ourselves back in the rolling farmland and wooded valleys of Upstate New York. The roads are surprisingly smooth but there are no shoulders and the edges drop away into ditches. The result is if you miss a turn or want to make a u-turn to go back to a farm stand or something it is the devil’s own job to find a place to make a turn. 

You get used to it and fortunately traffic isn’t very heavy at all and the scenery makes up for all ills. The absence of public land restricts wild camping possibilities too. We’ve turned to the Harvest Host program for alternatives to camp sites. Ontario Orchards has a massive farm store on the southern edge of Oswego and offers free parking in their extensive orchards five miles away. 

We got some fruit at the store and Layne forbid me to even approach the pastry counter so we got out with actual farm food. The parking lot was as you can see just a grass space.  The night was silent, except for occasional bursts of rain that pattered on the roof. Rusty was snoring and didn’t even notice.  

Upstate New York

I had no idea there was so much physical beauty in this part of New York, west of the finger lakes all the way to Pennsylvania. This is the land of abundance. You have to see it to understand my astonishment. The farm stands are everywhere. 

The locally grown stuff is explanation enough to illustrate the richness of the soils here. 

Everything is lush and bursting with life. 

The forests produce lumber for the Amish and firewood stands for campers. Help yourself to a roadside bundle of logs, split for your convenience at five bucks apiece. 

The roads are smooth for the most part and wind endlessly up hills and through valleys filled with crops in fields cut out of the forests. 

I was reading the history of the Lewis and Clark expedition and as they came up to the largely treeless prairie filled with game the comment came up by contrast that the East was overfilled with trees! 

During the summer the Sunset View Creamery teaches youngsters about animal husbandry and how to look after calves and how to milk cows, just like Betty: 

Had I children I’d drive them around these hills all summer to see how cows sleep on air beds and are fed a precise diet for the best milk. How they spend their days free to roam inside and out and how they are milked and how cheese is made and ice cream in human sized quantities.

I am not cut out to be a farmer but I appreciate the work that goes into making food.

I suppose it would be unfair to ask would you prefer to eat cheese from these happy cows… if only because most people (including us) don’t have access. And for some people the cost is prohibitive. But the more I age the more I prefer to eat less factory products and more of these types: 

It was a lovely stay, made better by a long chat I had with Mrs Hoffman and we talked for a long time about dogs, the rescue and training there of, the need for tourists to expand the possibilities beyond nearby Watkins Glen, her Italian ancestry, and the richness of the land around her. 

We stopped for lunch in Bath a town that lives in the modern era as you’d expect but in such a way as you can recreate in your own mind what life must have been like in the heady days of revolution. 

Rusty just enjoyed the walk but I had my mind on those people who settled here all those years ago carving homes out of the forest. 

Genesee Fever is now believed to be typhoid or malaria diseases long since eradicated by science so you don’t have to worry about them. However, polio is making a comeback in New York so if you want to see how life evolves without vaccinations you will now have your chance. 

I am really glad our meanderings brought us this way. An area worth exploring.