Later Trips

haven't posted in a while. But I did do some travelling up north, all the way to Lake Ontario for that matter. Also, in addition to the new Ticonderoga page, I drove back home from there using NY 9N, on a rainy fall day. Except for the potential of a lot of congestion in the height of the season. NY 9N from Lake George to Ticonderoga then Lake Champlain is a great drive, and direct too.

Here is a shot from a deck of a closed eatery near Hague on NY 9n:


Here is a shot of the town park and dock in Hague Center.

Every Exit and Rest Area Has a Picture

Exit 42, Last Real Exit Before Canada, on US 11 in Champlain

Every Exit and Rest Area Has a Picture

From my recent foray into North Country from Plattsburgh to the Canadian border & Champlain, I now have a picture of every Exit and rest area from Albany to Canada. I know, sounds nerdy & obsessive, but after five & one half years it makes this site more complete.
See Exits on Northway

Point Au Roche Rest Area, last one before Canada

Up In North Country Now, Plattsburgh

And it is mercifully cool and green, totally reassuring when I hear it was in the 90s in Jersey & Philadelphia today. Too cool even for me, I got a little sick as my body couldn't handle it all at once. But I am covering the Northway today all the way to Canadian border, snapping pictures of each exit, Village of Champlain and sights alongside. Saws these big bovine friends casually grazing today:


They taste good too!

New Construction & Bottleneck on Northway

As I stated on my site, the southbound span over the Schroon River, just south of Exit 24, MP 68.3, has been removed, to be replaced soon. This is between the Warrensburg and Bolton Landing exits. So all traffic necks down into one lane each way. So on high traffic days, like Friday afternoons and evenings northbound, Sunday afternoons and evenings southbound, prepare yourself for a possible 20 minute to a half hour wait to cross over the remaining span. This is just up the road from the infamous 2004 flash flood that washed out both road beds of I-87 as well as East and West Schroon River Roads below.

Shot from the Exit 24 Overpass Looking South

Added a new page for Ticonderoga

I had been planning on doing this for years. So this weekend I made a couple of trips down to Ticonderoga from Schroon Lake so I can officially get my new Ticonderoga page up and running. It was even a shade greener down in the Lake Champlain Valley than in the rest.


Drove up to Crown Point too, to see the temporary free ferry and the start of the new bridge too.

But don't worry, Homeland Security is running this ferry service. We all know for ages Al Qaeda has had its heart set on disrupting the all important lower Lake Champlain link between the most important state in the nation and New York. But with our boys in blue on point, Osama beware!

Great Weekend, Great Weather

Great Weekend, Great Weather

Spent the weekend up in the Schroon Lake area, the weather was great. Hot enough in the days but cool at night. No need for air conditioning, which I don't have anyways in my new used car anyways. Tons of people around, enjoying themselves boating, tubing, swimming in the lake and rivers. Even the bugs were on the decline, much fewer little pests alight to make life miserable for us warm blooded animals.

Some Green Thoughts

Due to the intensely wet weather we are having, for the last 2 years, it is truly green out there. Which is good to a point, if you don't mind clouds of skeeters or mold everywhere.
Even though I do a lot of driving, I try to stay a little greener. At home, I will park maybe a half mile short and walk the rest of the way, or at least park, head out, at the end of the lot next to the exit I plan on using. A few hundred yards less on each trip saves a couple miles a week and gives you a lot of good exercise. Also, it saves your car from those piddling stop and go driving or annoying scrapes. When I am out in the country, I usually just park on the right of the shoulder, on the side I am going on, for each stop. Once again, not much in the way of distance but it cuts out more wasteful maneuvers. Also, I am a fiend for timing traffic lights or at least putting as little power as necessary to get to a red light.
Also, my preventive maintenance, especially that ignition coil pack I put in last year, really have paid off in gas mileage and performance, I have a new(er) car, a 97 Nissan Sentra with a good small motor that I want to put on the road. Hopefully that will get me good mileage too.

Status Report

Haven't been up to too much. But I added another NYRoutes.com site, the Farmers Daughters Drive In of Saratoga in Saratoga, the town farm part on NY Route 29 towards Schuylerville. It is a cool little drive in ice cream sandwich place that has a rabid clientele of ice cream junkies.

We Got Snow

Lot's of Wet Heavy Snow

We finally got some snow around here, better late than never.

Friendly Signage

This was spotted at the end of a driveway leading to some horse paddock near Saratoga. Usually people aren't this friendly and kind around here:

Then again, last October I was camping out around Old Forge, at the end of this town road by some fish and game club. Mind you, I was on the public side of their gate (the club btw leases their land from the town, so hardly very private), camped in the back of this clearing. Yet some fat arsehole in his oversized pick up had to put on his best redneck act and force me out because his lame club leased all the land from the river north. Like I was really taking up any space that he or his mates were trying to use or this was his own land. Don't get me wrong, people aren't usually like this up here. Unfortunately, you can find types like him everywhere.

Winter Doldrums

Winter Doldrums

Haven't been too active with my blogging. I heard that blogging seems to be on the wane now with the rise of mindless Twitter tweets and other superficial social stuff. Not that blogging is some sort of high literature, but TWEETS seem really dumbass and trite. I have spend a lot of time up north last fall, but little action on the web scene, even though I have a much better camera now. The weather, like today, seems perverse, 2 feet plus snow in Washington DC but nothing here. Or we get snow, then it rains. At least we have been spared ice storms.

Various Trips this Fall

Though I haven't been posting, and spent a good chunk of time at home in this pathetic roadway of a town, I have done a lot of travelling this fall. I just got back from Tupper Lake, of course my wife's venerable old 97 Camry decided to pop either the crank or the camshaft seal today in the cold, so I left a wake of oil like a crippled ship all the way back home. But they are going to re-open Big Tupper Ski Resort the day after Christmas, if they get some more snow. I got some pictures, mainly mediocre, but I got a nice shot of Tupper Lake lake all frozen over at sunset.

Sorrry For the Hiatus

Though I have plenty of work here at home, really boring but fairly good pay, I have been doing a lot of travel in the last FOUR months that I neglected to post anything on this blog. Though I did update the living hell out of all three of my sites, including centering all the pages contents in the center as well as renaming pages and chasing down tons of broken links with my nifty simple free Xenu link checker program.
There were also plenty of trips up north too, for camping, hunting, business and general escape from reality of life around here. Labor Day weekend I did a road trip up to Sackets Harbor which is west of Watertown on Lake Ontario. My old time customers from Tavern at Schroon Lake have a bunch of restaurants like the Nottingham Chop House on Wolf Road, They had three up in Sackets Harbor which is a nice little lake side resort yacht type of village that was home to the US Navy back when British run Canada was an enemy. Or in the early 1800s in the days of wooden ships and iron men. So do we have wooden men now, or fiberglass carbon fiber ones crewing ships?

Well I had fun shooting pics in all three restaurants as well as coming up with some better designs that have a management section where one can change the whole menu or the store hours from a back end, see Goodfellos. The new Nikon camera got a baptism then, for some better shots than that lame old olympus I had for years. I also camped out in some farmers field for a night, asked him, as well as skulked around Watertown on the NY 3 strip. Being on NY 3, it was natural that I double back to Tupper for at least some time.

A Pleasant Picture

I took this years ago with my cheap but good first digital camera. I think it was shot up in Saranac Lake, but who cares?
That little camera was great, it fit snug in my pocket until one day I went for a swim with it in the Schroon River.

Latest trip

Just spent three days camping out, more like working up by Schroon Lake at everyones' fave free site by the falls. I had a new set of brochures to pass out, and I did a lot of brochure dumping all through the area. It really helped to impress the old customers who may have been hestitating before another season to see some solid paper products too. Found two whole fishing poles snorkeling in the Schroon River by the falls, one of them for a local who droppped it earlier then asked me to find it. The other I found at dusk during an sfter dinner swim, that one was for me. Went all the way up to 33, past Lewis, to check things out then back again, passing out brochures everywhere.

Been out of circulation

had a lot of work around here, besides the weather is really bad most of the time, constant raid. Honestly, while I don't have the enthusiasm I once had for the Adirondacks, I still care about the 'Daks and my site and customers, those I have left. Went for a small hike last month up near Bolton Landing on Lake George, Cat Mountain or something like that. It was fun to do some real hiking as opposed to aerobics or boring walks around here. Got a few great shots of Lake George too.

More Site Work

I haven't done much travelling at all. But I did spend a lot of time reworking my main sites. I downloaded the Xenu link checker from some german site, Xenu is some alien race from L Ron Hubbard's, of Scientology science fiction I found out.
What a mess my sites were, there were broken links galore. So I spent a good day or two, like 24 hours, re-doing tons of pages, including my snazzy dropdown menus which were putting bad links on all my pages. Then I went to town on my utterly bereft of business western part of the NYRoute28.com pages, like Herkimer and Little Falls, where I had no pics. So I took a drive out that way to mainly take pictures but I did try to drum some business up. But it looked like Hooverville out that way in the Western Mohawk Valley. At least it was a good crisp picture taking day so I got some decent digital shots.

Latest News Ho Hum

Night Snow Drive

Latest News Ho Hum

A couple weeks ago went up to Tupper for a few days, but accomplished next to nothing as usual except for work on other stuff that I could have done anywhere. Now that I have the new computer running I don't feel bad taking the laptop and leaving Eileen without internet. The new desktop is great a quad core processor with 3.2 gigs of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive, more than enough. But it has Window Vista which takes a little getting used to.

The highlight of that trip was some nice fresh snow, fluffy and cold, perfect for cross country skiing, I just went down to the school on the village line and skiied along the trails between the school and the museum, nothing too radical but a good workout and easy to get too. Thank god I invested in those snow tires at the end of last year cause the drive there and back was in some snow but without any problems.

Went to Old Forge and beyond a couple Sundays ago. No good business but at least my friend Bob was there at the Strand Theater and was willing to give me passes for an ad. Compared to everyone else that was great. That is a great place and it's nice to see some owner operator who cares running a movie theater, not one of those mills in the malls.

Weekend in Lake George

Finally got out of town for a weekend up in Lake George. What a waste. The place was totally dead, no business anywhere. It doesn't help that the unemployment rate in the Glens Falls area is the highest in the region.

Then I wanted to get out in the morning and go cross country skiing. For a village/town that spends millions promoting tourism, they had NO ski trails what so ever. I went to Glens Falls, the old mill town, who has a beautiful set of groomed and lit trails, 5 miles of them in Cole Woods aka Crandall Park. Figure that one out! It's right off of US 9 in the north part of the city by the Y, there is even a trail beneathe the Northway. It's between Exits 18 and 19

More Green Thoughts

Going through Saranac Lake yesterday, I was really impressed that, in one of the coldest cities in the US, so many buildings didn't even have rudimentary storm windows, doors or vestibules. This is the sort of contemptible laziness and cheapness I despise. I mean, in like 2 years of heating, one would recoup the cost of the windows. But some crummy landlord will rent some old building with 100 year old doors and windows and tons of plate glass, and not give a thought about simple, common sense, middle class things like cutting your heating bill and cutting the amount of stuff that has to be burned to heat it, scum. Or newer buildings with flat roofs and no windows or natural ventilation, so they have to be mechanically heated and cooled year round. So when I see this as the norm, along with stores arranged so only the foolhardy would dare walk and walled off from the houses nearby so Joe SixPack drives his full size pick up everywhere, I can only have contempt at the people who whine about energy prices and demand we drill or somehow we are all going to be living in the dark ages when they squander energy hand over foot. I don't say we can't heat or cool buildings and live comfortably, but a well insulated building with good passive cooling and ventilation, is more comfortable and cheaper to run, ergo more green. So there is no real sacrifice if it is done right from the start. Sure some people are doing this now and if the government has to legislate it, it will be mediocrity.
Also, lets put in some sensible bike and walking paths. I heard some cranks on some so called news channel whining about bike path grants as if this was some hideous thing to spend money on like gold fixtures in the Whitehouse bathroom. So let's have nation of soft, fat slobs falling over from heart attacks and diabetes while consuming energy and junk food like gluttons. Don't walk or ride a bike anywhere, make sure your kid doesn't have to make that horrible quarter mile trek to school, drive or put him on the bus. When you hunt or fish, make sure you bring your ATV, god forbid if you break a sweat. We are victims of our own success, the success of the transport vehicle and junk food industry, coupled with the crummiest sort of planning and sidewalks. So let's fight another war for more oil instead, that is so patriotic!

Going Green

Being green is cool, but some people grouse about enviro-nazis and scoff at even the most common sense measures to conserve and protect, then turn around and call themselves conservationists cause they want a nice view from all 4 of their homes. Of course they claim they are logical but are as small minded and selfish as the radical enviros they criticize. So if it is pretty and green around their upscale homes they could care less about the other side of the tracks.
I am a practical person. So if I can walk or ride my bike somewhere i will. Even though the price of gas has dropped thank god, I still conserve.Usually I park closest to the exit and walk the extra 50 yards anyways. Not only does this save a miniscule amount of gas but it saves a lot of pointless wear and tear. Also it helps avoids a parking lot collision. Then if I want to go to a neighboring store I will walk. If this makes me look weird, so be it; only an utterly petty person would make a stink about that. Also, the exercise really helps and if people walked an extra mile or two a week instead of driving everywhere, we wouldn't have so many land whales croaking of heart attacks at 49 or taking insulin.

For example, I was at local big box place and one set of doors was locked at night. So these two young guys realize the doors are locked too but I told them the other set was open all the time. As I was walking over to the open doors, I saw these two obviously healthy guy drive their truck all of 40 yards to be near those doors. How lame! Same when I am on the road making sales, I go on foot as much as possible, at least you can spot and see things you would miss driving, which makes me more aware. Don't get me wrong, I love driving, but not stop and go nonsense in cities or parking lots. Get me on the open road and I'll go on all day.

Same with consuming packaged trash I don't need, Fill the water bottle, don't buy a plastic one from the cooler. Think of all the electricity, fuel, plastic and cost that bottled thing just consumed then save a $1.09.

Okay, enough of a lecture, have fun.

Just Bought AdirondackNorthway.com!

I know this sounds like trivia, but when I first started AdirondackNorthway.net in '05 they wanted $5000 for AdirondackNorthway.com, wow!! Then it was $1000, no way! I jsut tried it tonight for the heck and the domain vultures gave up and let it expire. So I snapped it up for $10/year like it should be. I will make that the main one soon and use the .net as a redirect.

Rainy Wet Warm Fall Weekend

What lame weather. Went up to Glens Falls today with my wife so she could do her job as a photographer at the NY State HS Girls Volleyball Playoffs at the Glens Falls Civic Center.

My New Plan

News Flash

NEW for 10/31/2008, There are Paper Brochures for this Site with my customers' listings available in over 60 venues from Albany to Lake George & North Creek, including both NB rest stops at Exits 9 & 18. This makes my Adirondack Northway site even a better place to advertise
I am working feverishly in Word 2K to put together that three fold brochure, readying it for the printer. I already paid the two folks in Lake George to distribute it. Likewise, I have been fixing up my Adirondack Northway site. It sat like an some fun old car in the woods for a year or two. So when I looked at some of those pages I haven't touched in years I was horrified at the backwardness. I created a little page, table and function to manage what pages what customer ads go on, so I don't have to hunt down and delete them myself, it's all done from a special page. But I have been working like a dog to upgrade all those lame old pages. When I first started it, I copied over the old crap from NYRoute30 as a start. I can still see the old 4 column tables I used for ads until I went to two columns and used includes that had rows for ads. Which makes that about three years out of date, like the Champlain page. But I have been adding new customers, pictures and redoing the ads with the new ad table function. Lot's of work but worth it!

Almanac Predictions

Colder than average winter, lot's of snow, get ready for that too, folks!

Getting Geared Up For Fall

Fall, My Fave Time of Year: Leaves, Hunting, Harvest

Okay it has been a bad year business and economy wise, plus I have vegged most of it in the capital district. But I am psyched now for some fall action and maybe some more business. At least the price of gas has dropped a bit. Now it's time for a new tent and a sportsmen license. There is supposed to be a bumper crop of turkeys this year, wanna get me one or two. Going to take my usual busman's holiday this weekend. My utterly brainless boring temp job could get along fine without me and since business and hours are slack there, good riddance. This is Colon's Weekend and I want celebrate a really intrepid explorer. Don't hand me any of this politically correct BS about Columbus, I just don't care. The Indians did't build the Northway, the Erie Canal or even the Waterline Railroad route. I earned a little vacation from the depressing reality around here. Here is a nice picture to calm all of you down:

Whiteface Mountain from Lake Placid Village

Latest Trip

Summer Days

I was up north last week. Trying to save what little business I have and the news was not so hot. But at least one website that went down when the place went out of business got resurrected as the place re-opened as a bistro, the Tavern at Schroon Lake. I spent the night in Schroon, but my fave campsite was taken so I pitched my tent in the skimpy clearing down the road from there. Broke camp just before some torrential downpours drenched the place. Better wet soggy weather than the oven in California with all the redwoods going up in smoke. My brother went out there and they got turned away from Big Sur cause of the fire.
I still care about the 'Daks and my business. I redid the header menus on my sites for a little better look. But the price of gas has cut into what little profit margin I have. As well as hurting my customers. I tried to give away free listing and links to these potential customers, just for stopping by. I put up their listings and links then emailed them, hoping I could get at least a link back to me out of it. But they didn't even bother to answer my email, maybe too much cash to count. It doesn't take much effort to reply to a personal email. So I yanked the links but left the rest of their listings on the page. If someone says he'd give me a link back to my site and doesn't even take the minute to do it, I can't respect him at all. Maybe my sites aren't hot stuff but at least I keep my end of the bargain and answer every customer call or email I get and try to ameliorate it.

Mud Season

Mud Season

I was up north for a couple days. The weather was so warm, as well as the water levels. Looking for some peace and quiet and I found it. But the good weather is bringing out the noisiest pests imaginable, Harley riders. Sorry, but your mass produced macho toughness does not impress me. Biker chic is on the same level as hip hop fashion. You can hear those inconsiderate lowlifes 30 miles away winding out their deliberately noisy machines. Heavy trucks, that we all depend on, make 1/10 the noise you do, as well as drive a lot more sensibly. Even the obnoxious thumper cars(one with huge bass speakers and stereos), which thankfully are on the decline, sound doesn;t carry as far as some load on his "bike". But I guess all that freedom you get by making yourself go deaf as well as annoying others, outweighs all the negative benefits.

I haven't done hardly anything but maintenance on my site in the last year. I have new job, in Pittsfield Mass. This is taking most of my time. Also, my other Worden Safety Products web design, seems to fill up most of the rest. Or maybe I lost my energy and zeal? My old Eagle, always faithful and semi-woods friendly, bit the dust last spring with a bad differential, and it's replacement, an old Subaru(yechh automatic) doesn't inspire me like the Eagle did. Plus the price of gas is a real downer. I didn't even get another hunt/fish license yet. But I haven't forgotten things yet. I vow to get up there a few times before year's end. There are some old friends I really want to see as well as the mountains.

Been Very Inactive, But It loks Like a Good Summer Anyways

Well, I have really let things slide this spring and summer, it has been a bad year for me. I have vegetated in the Albany area since New Years, doing the bare minimum. Guess I am running out of steam, hope it isn't permanent.

Hey Folks, Long Time No Post

Been a while since I posted. Between the weather and lack of new business, I really haven't done all that much. God, I hate this crummy rain. Started a new website, based on Route 100 in Vermont, or VTRoute100.com. Route 100 runs north south, east of the Green Mountains. Almost all the ski areas in Vermont are off of or near Route 100. But so far no customers, it's tough in Vermont, like Lake Placid. Please, let it snow for once!

Halloween is Coming

and I am going to dress up as an itinerant webmaster. Actually, I once won a Halloween costume contest in a bar in Troy. I was going turkey hunting the next day in Cherry Valley, so I wore my complete camo outfit.

Basically, I've been hovering around the Capital District. Last Friday I went up to Johnstown and re-visited my old campsite in Benson, NW of Northville. But the rain and sleet drove me out.

Snow Already

It's snowed up here tonight in Tupper, here's the proof:

Let's hope this keeps up during the Winter so it won't be a washout like the last one!

Fall Colors

Blasted out to Johnstown to work on my new website there, adksportscenter.com, then on to Old Forge. I camped out last night along the old road grade, now a snowmobile-powerline trail, about 8 miles south of old Forge. On my way back from Boonville, I took old Moose River Road to McKeever, where you pick up NY 28 just south of the Moose River Bridge. The trees are in max colors and it was quite the hard core old road drive with fall decor.



Moose River Road in Forestport

End to End

My last post was the start of the Adirondack Trail in Fonda, well, by Sunday I got up to Malone in time to take this beautiful pic of the north end of the Adirondack Trail.

Mohawk Trail Escape

I broke my butt trying to finish this crap in Averill Park so I could get up North. I finally took off around 9 PM, taking NY 7 from Latham to I-890 in Schenectady, to NY 5 in Glenville, then take NY 5 all the way to NY 30 A in Fonda. An anger check was that by the time I got to I-890 in Schen., I was ready to kill 1/2 the other "drivers". But from 890 west, I was fine. Old NY 5 is great, it goes through the best parts of Amsterdam, and you follow the railroad most of the way. In Fonda, just west of the light at NY 30A, I ran into this sign on their remodeled Main Street. Who else would stop to take a picture like this?



The Beginning of the Adirondack Trail Sign

Hello Again

Up in the 'Daks, away from the rabble of the Capital District. A couple of cretins have been lurking at this blog, looking for some useless trivia to throw at other people as if it was scandal. The weather is great today, for once we have a warm and dry day. It is turning into a tropical rainforest with all the extra water up here, but out west it is dry. Printed up some new promo for my sites, something I haven't done for quite a while.

I've been using PHP, basically HTML with brains, on my sites for a while. You can use include files in PHP, or you can insert a smaller file into a larger PHP one. That is how I do all my headers and footers so they are all the same. They are just one file for all pages, as well as my ads, each customer has his own little included PHP file. But the files are all on the same server. I finally realized you can access includes on other, or remote, servers. So I am now changing over my Hunting page, so the meat of the page is a file on NYRoute30.com. This means I only have to edit one hunting file and all three sites will use it. Which is good since the page is way out of shape.

In general, you can use PHP just like an HTML file. Go to PHP.net and you can easily learn how to use this open source, powerful language without paying more royalties to Bill Gates as if you used ASP instead. It is part of Apache server package and that is a free download for a server. ASP is the MS equivalent of PHP, but that ain't free; though the IIS, the personal web-server program included in Win XP, does understand ASP. You can do on-line databases easily with PHP like I am doing on this new on-line store.

0 for 3, you're out!

I bought this wireless hub to hook up to my friend's motel system. When hooking it up the old hub, the old hub(not wireless) conked out on me. No big deal, it was a few years old. So I drove about 100 miles round trip to Radio Shack in Johnstown to get another regular old hub. So I hook the new one up, even plugging in all the RJ-45 jacks before powering it up. But that one fresh out of the box was a loser too. So I had to use the wireless hub in place of the old one so he would have some sort of network. So instead of the wireless hub being upstairs next to the door, I had to leave it in the crawlspace under the rafters where all the cables came together; where it gives poor performance. To top it off, when I got back to Averill Park, I plugged my laptop into it's charger, and the damm charger, less than two months old, craps out on me. A freaking stone simple DC power supply, and two hub, with no moving parts or switches, decide to throw a wrench in my works so I lose almost a whole day with that nonsense. I can understand a car or computer, with tons of moving parts adn related systems, crapping our. But these simple things? I am really upset and depressed, it seems I have some sort of reverse Midas touch, everything I touch falls apart.

I really am not getting much road or woods time in, I spent the last three times dong more webdesign in my room than sales, driving or hiking around. I came back using only 2/3 of a tank of gas. Maybe I am losing my edge, but I have a lot of web work and gas still is expensive, so that's all cool.

Before I left this time, I replaced my LF brake caliper on the Nanny Goat with a nice, rebuilt loaded brake caliper. I did pads and rotors in the front last June, but the RF brake caliper seized on me so I replaced that one with a loaded caliper of the same brand too, from my pals at BAP-GEON. The moral of that story: if you are doing brakes on an older car with caliper/pad brackets, get loaded calipers. Not only do you get a rebuilt caliper piston, but all new hardware and pins and a cleaned up bracket. They even come with pads too. It's only twice as much as good pads alone!! Now the Nanny Goat rolls so much smoother with freed up brakes!

Web Journeyman in Averill Park, NY

I am ensconced in Averill Park, working on a new shopping cart site on Worden Safety Chocks. Try to login and create an identity. I am in the bowels of the old Faith Mills, cranking away on laptop which is pretending to be a desktop, actually the desktop is upstairs.

Northbound Soon!

Gotta get out of this place and go back up North to Tupper at least.