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Life
We arrived home Saturday night from our 10-day trip to my home state of New York. It was a mix of seeing family in Rochester, visiting old college friends, and camping in three gorgeous state parks. New York is especially beautiful in fall, with so many varied kinds of terrain, and I loved being there again in my favorite season. Last week's Monday post included a recap and photos from the first half of the trip (the waterfalls in Letchworth State Park are spectacular!).
Monday, we drove to Kring Point State Park in the Thousand Islands region of New York, an area on the St. Lawrence river, in between New York and Ontario with--yes--over a thousand islands (1700!). Kring Point is out at the end of a narrow peninsula (so, almost an island itself), surrounded by water so that almost every campsite is waterfront (or at least waterview). But I think we had the best site there! It was a huge campsite, with granite outcroppings right on the water.
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| Beautiful waterfront campsite |
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| Dinner al fresco at sunset |
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| Rocks in front of our campsite were a bird gathering spot! |
I was still in a bad flare-up of my chronic illness (and even now, not quite out of the woods yet) that was not helped by all the running around we did to see family in Rochester (though I enjoyed the visits), so our days in this beautiful place were quiet and relaxed, with lots of downtime ... and lots of reading time! It was such a peaceful place to rest and recuperate.
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| View from my bed! |
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| Reading in my lounge chair in the sunshine |
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| Perfect place to rest & relax! |
I rested all day Tuesday so that I could manage an evening at our friends' dairy farm nearby. She and I ran our college sorority together our senior year, and we've often gotten together with her and her husband since. He and his son manage his family's huge dairy farm in northern NY (a five-generation family farm), and they took us on a tour on 4-wheelers. I didn't have the energy/stamina to drive one myself, but I rode on my husband's, and we enjoyed the tour. My friend cooked a delicious dinner that we ate on their lovely back deck, and we had a blast catching up, reminiscing, and laughing!
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| Fun farm tour on four-wheelers! |
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| So happy to spend time with old friends! |
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| We even got to pet a 3-day-old calf |
The next day, we visited a local town, Clayton, right on the river. The bookstore was closed on Wednesdays, but we went in a few other shops and had lunch on the water.
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| Lunch at Shipwrecked in Clayton |
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| Bookstore was closed :( |
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| Pretty walk along the river |
Our last campsite of the trip was at Delta Lake State Park, north of the Rome/Utica area. I hadn't been able to get a waterfront spot there, but it didn't matter because the lake was completely dry on that side of the park! No water at all. That side is normally about 20 feet deep, and they've had a terrible drought in central and western NY. We were able to take our kayaks to the other side of the lake, which is normally 30-50 feet deep. Seeing how low it was, with over 20-feet of exposed shale, was pretty stunning.
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| Water in Delta Lake was over 20-feet lower than usual! |
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| Kayaking among some fall foliage |
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| The lake near the campground - dry all the way across! |
We met another old college sorority friend and her husband for dinner in Rome. It's so great to catch up with old friends!
Otherwise, we relaxed and enjoyed our last days of camping for the trip.
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| I love fall camping! |
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| And I love reading by the campfire. |
My husband drove home Saturday (his birthday), so we celebrated yesterday, and our son and his girlfriend came over for dinner (I forgot to take any pictures!).
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| Opening birthday presents on the porch. |
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Ten Untouched Books Tag: What Books on Your Shelves Are Still Untouched? This was a fun one that sent me to my shelves to grab 10 books that had been there for more than a year (too easy for me, so I went for some of the books I've had the longest but still haven't read). Maybe now that I've pulled them out and talked about them, I might actually read them!
Weekly Reading Update: Thrillers, Mysteries, Ghost Stories, and More Fun Fall Reading! My reading update from September 26, before we left on our trip.
Readers Who (Secretly?) Want to Write Tag - This was a unique Booktube tag, with questions about writing rather than reading. I talked about my writing career--books, articles, and reviews--as well as what I'd like to write in the future.
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After finishing The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, I reached for another classic for Shorty September and RIP season: Nancy Drew and the Mystery At Lilac Inn by Carolyn Keene. If that sounds familiar from an earlier update, it's because it is! Earlier last month, I read the 1930 version of this novel. I was curious about what had been updated in the later versions that I read as a child, so I got it out of the library. It had been updated in 1961 (and again in 1989 but clearly with very few changes), so this was what I would have read in the 1970's. I was shocked to find out that it's a very different story! While there is a thread through it from the original version, this later mystery is far more complex, with more characters. Some of the same characters appear but in different roles. It blew my mind that it was so completely different, so I reread the entire book. The conclusion was mostly the same but with a far twistier, more dangerous path to get there. I thoroughly enjoyed this immersion in nostalgia. It was a perfect comfort read while sick.
With the start of October, I began reading Burn by Peter Heller, one of my favorite authors of outdoor thrillers. I enjoyed Celine for Booktopia in 2017, and my husband and I both loved his novels The River, The Guide, and The Last Ranger. This one is a bit different, an apocalyptic thriller. Two men who have been friends since childhood, Jess and Storey, get together every fall for a hunting trip. This year, they chose the remote northern Maine woods. When they leave the wilderness, though, they encounter destroyed bridges, preventing them from driving south. As they walk with their gear, they come upon towns that have been completely burned down, and--strangest of all--there are no people anywhere. They find a couple of bodies, but where did everyone else go? What happened while they were in the woods? It's another compelling novel from Heller. He is an outstanding storyteller, and even in this dark, dangerous world, his beautiful nature writing stands out. It's a hard one to put down at night!
On audio, I finished listening to The Ghost and Mrs. Muir by R.A. Dick (a pseudonym for Josephine Aimee Campbell Rowley Leslie). I have fond memories of watching the TV show when I was a child, so when I saw this audio on sale, I thought it would be a perfect fit for RIP season, the Book Cougars' Year of Reading Ghost Stories, and Shorty September! It's about a widowed young woman with two young children who moves to a house on the waterfront. It's cheap enough for her to afford because ... it's haunted! Not everyone can hear the ghost, but Mrs. Muir can. He's an old sea captain who built the house and has some definite ideas about what should happen to it! I enjoyed it very much, and it had some interesting plot twists that I didn't remember from the TV series.
My husband, Ken, is now reading The Spider by Lars Kepler, a husband and wife team (which I didn't realize before), that I gave him for Father's Day. It's the 9th book in their Detective Joona Linna series (oops, sorry honey, I didn't realize that!). In this Swedish thriller, the detective is after a serial killer. I'd heard good things about the author(s), so I thought he'd like it.
Our son, 31, is reading Map's Edge by David Hair, a fantasy novel he bought at his favorite used bookstore when he was visiting home a few weeks ago. The cover is gorgeous!
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What are you and your family reading this week?
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