Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Day 2: Tuesday

Excuse any weird formatting. Blogger's acting wierd and I don't have time to mess around with it a lot. I'll try to fix it later.

Forget “I love NY”. I love the NY Thruway. No local traffic, no extended construction zones. Just 250 miles or so of smooth sailing. Ditto the Mass Turnpike. Worth every penny of tolls.

Between Rochester and Syracuse just off the thruway is the village of Seneca Falls. Since it came up around my 2 hour pit stop and since I’d read Miriam Grace Monfredo’s Seneca Falls series, I decided to stop. In 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott spearheaded the first women’s right’s convention here and issued a Declaration of Sentiments. There is a nice, albeit small, national park on the site now.



Remains of the Wesleyan Chappel where the convention was held.




Wesleyan Chappel.



Neat memorial/water feature.



And of course, wouldn’t you know, I found something connected to knitting. (Click to enlarge.)





East of Utica, the highway winds alongside the Mohawk River through some very beautiful semi-mountainous (think Appalachians, not Rockies) scenery. Skirting Albany, you cross the Hudson River and head to Massachusetts. I wish I'd gotten some pictures, but I was too busy driving.

Now, for some reason I’ve always envisioned Massachusetts as fairly level. Not Northern Indiana flat, but fairly level. But it is definitely hillitudinous (it’s my blog, I can make up words). Before I left Indiana I had just listened to Nathan Philbrick’s Mayflower on audio, so it was cool to go through areas he referenced. Yes, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. No, I was not near Plymouth. But Philbrick takes his book up through King Philip’s War and some of that takes place along the Connecticut River and the Mohawk Valley.

Today I’m off to the wide open spaces of Maine and New Brunswick. Okay, I don’t know what New Brunswick is like, but Maine looks pretty empty on the map.

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