Forced Family Fun, Part Two

After the museum, we headed back upstairs for the tour, but first did this simulator where you got to experience a couple bobsled runs, luge, skeleton, and ski jumps!  It was pretty low budget, but Carter loved it!  After that, it was time for our tour!  Of course the most exciting part was being in the arena where the Miracle happened!  It was hard to believe that the footage we've seen all these years happened right here!

Very little has changed about the arena, actually.  They just replaced a few sections of seats (but not all), painted the stairs for safety, and replaced the scoreboard.

They also added the names of all of the 1980 team members in a ring around the top of the arena.

We got to sit at one end and watch a video of the last couple minutes of the game.  It was surreal to look at that ice and realize it all happened there!  I can't wait to watch the movie again!

We learned so much about both of the Lake Placid Olympics, and lots of Winter Olympic history in general, courtesy of plaques throughout the complex.  So many athletes have trained in Lake Placid that every Winter Olympics has some sort of connection.  From the rink lobby, we could see the flag poles in the order they came into the opening ceremonies--including flags of countries that no longer exist!  Beyond that you can see the concrete of the speed skating oval where Eric Heiden won five gold medals in 1980, sweeping the entire sport.

You could also see the ski jump and bobsled runs from there.  Look beyond the flag for the ski jump...

Here is the inside of the 1932 rink, which was apparently built from the plans of a blimp hangar!

Back outside, this is the outside of the 1932 rink section of the building.

This is the front of the 1980 rink part.  The oval is down to the left.

This is the oval (which was hosting a BBQ event) and Lake Placid High School in the background.  It was closed for a whole month in 1980 and served as press headquarters.

This was back at the other end where we started, outside the visitor's center adjacent to the Olympic Center.

Once we finished up there, we decided to head up to Whiteface Mountain.  It's the only high peak in the Adirondacks that you can drive to, and that's definitely our speed.  I would personally love to do some of the outdoorsy activities in Lake Placid, like stand-up paddleboarding or hiking (or even the pedal-driven rail car thing my cousin sent me), but alas, my family is not really built that way.  So the simpler, the better.  But we don't get to see mountains too often, so I felt it was important to get the kids there.  It wasn't too bad of a drive, and soon enough, we made our way to the top.  This was the view from the parking area, looking up toward the summit.

The first stop was this castle structure that housed the gift shop and a café.  Through the tunnel to the left was a hiking trail to the summit.

We walked back down the parking area a bit to get to our way to the top, an elevator!

There was a 500-foot tunnel carved through the rock (with a cool copper ceiling).  It was way cooler in there than outside, much like our trip to Howe Caverns last year.

At the top, the view was beautiful.  A little hazier than I would have liked, but still nice.

Lake Placid is part of the U-shaped cluster, and Mirror Lake is off to the left behind it.

This picture shows part of the road we drove to get there.

This is the weather station at the top of the mountain.

You can see people way off on part of the hiking trail access.  There weren't many railings there, so no thanks!

This other building is where the elevator comes up.  There was a cool fireplace in there that hasn't been burned in 50+ years, since the weather station arrived, because it would throw off the readings!

Time for a partial family pic at the top of the mountain!  I'll spare you the crazy one!

From here you can see the top of the parking area and the top of the castle off in the distance.

We didn't stay up there for too long, probably less than a half hour, mostly because the bugs up there were horrible!  I don't know if it's because they have no predators there, or what, but there were all sorts of bugs and they were everywhere.  I held off from posting one of my selfie attempts where you can count at least seven bugs in the picture.  It was pretty gross.  Oddly enough, a couple hours later in the car, I felt behind my ear and felt something gritty there.  At first I scraped and got some black pieces, then some red.  I don't know if it was all bug, all scab, or half and half, but I definitely had a bug bite there that drove me nuts for two days.  I'm hoping it was nothing major, but it was so weird.  

After that, we hopped back in the car and made the 2.5 hour drive back to Watertown, near where we ate dinner the previous night.  It was nice doing the dark portion of the previous night's drive in the daylight, but I was very ready to be out of the car by the end.  We'd actually had a rough 24 hours or so with the kids--lots of bugging each other, lots of complaining about boredom during the tour, lots of Jacob asking to shoot hoops somewhere--really starting with the hotel room in Lake Placid and continuing through the next evening in Watertown--and I had pretty much had it by then.  I wasn't in the mood for the one gluten-free dinner option we had, so a couple people had sandwiches in the room and otherwise we just made do with snacks.  It was a pretty low key night and luckily both kids went down quickly enough for my patience to hold out.  We had another busy day ahead, and I was thankful to finally get a decent night's sleep!

Stay tuned for part three!

Forced Family Fun, Part One

When we got Jacob's lacrosse schedule this year, it was apparent that with only two tournaments, one of which was in Syracuse, our tournament-related travels wouldn't be too extensive.  Still, we wanted to make the most of our one trip to Watertown since we don't get up there often and it was a good time to be off work.  But then the passport issue popped up and the dreams of finally traveling to Ottawa or making it to Montreal in warm weather faded away.  We'd talked about going to Lake Placid before, so now seemed to be the perfect time.  The kids weren't thrilled about it, but sometimes you just have to do things and hope they appreciate them later.

I took the day off on Wednesday, since this was my one easy week to take off at work.  My boss took off the whole thing, so three days was all I could really muster, and it ended up being important to be there anyway after the laptop theft and all.  All's well with that, by the way--as much as it can be--although I did realize they also stole my backup sunglasses in my car.  Hope they enjoy those fancy $5 Walmart specs.  I never did get to wear them, and I really liked that case that I got years ago for free at my old job.  Darn it.  Anyway, Craig was working a half day and Carter went to daycare, since I didn't request that day off in time.  Since I hadn't really been exercising much over the past week or two, I decided that I needed to take advantage of the nice weather that morning and get in a workout.  It was way too humid to run, but it was a perfect morning for a bike ride!  I wound through a couple neighborhoods and ended up at the Erie Canal path.  It was so lovely.

See that goose in the middle of the path?  He hissed at me.  He did not like me being anywhere near his crew.  Never had to stop a bike ride for geese before.

I rode nearly to the next town and finally turned back around to head home.  I still had packing to do, after all!  I snapped this pic first, though.  Canal life is so pleasant.  

I took a path home through Greece Canal Park, and couldn't help but laugh when I saw a dad and two boys on bikes near the park entrance, all looking at their devices.  I have no idea what was happening there.  My ride was just over an hour and just short of 10 miles.  Jacob was waiting for me at home, and it turned out something spooked him and he was convinced someone was in the house, so he hid in the bathroom while I was gone.  Ugh.  I made up for it with some time in the pool.  I vacuumed it while simultaneously playing ring toss with Jacob, and it was such a great morning for pool time with him.  We had a lot of fun!

I did some frantic packing and once Craig came home and we finished up loading the van, we swung by daycare to grab Carter, and we were off!  We had a bit of a hike ahead of us, as Lake Placid was five hours away.  We strategically planned to stop at the Red Robin in Watertown for dinner to use Jacob's birthday coupon, since it was a perfect halfway point.  It gave us a preview of where our two other hotels were, since we'd be back in this area for most of the rest of the trip.  I was able to get a reasonable-ish room in Lake Placid for July 3rd, but the 4th was out of the question!  The drive to Lake Placid was pretty interesting, I guess.  We drove around Fort Drum, then hit lots of trees and winding roads, and lots of little towns and houses of questionable inhabitability.  Unfortunately, it got dark as we really got to the mountains, so that was a little harrowing.  We did enjoy driving through Tupper Lake and Saranac Lake, though, and even saw some fireworks as we passed through Saranac.

When we arrived in Lake Placid, it was really interesting.  The main tourist area looked pretty cool.  I spotted the optician shop owned by my childhood friend's family, and we scoped out shops to visit the next day.  When we arrived at our hotel, we were rather unhappy to discover (particularly at 10pm) that the parking lot appeared to be full.  It took a good 45 minutes (and a couple stressful, unsuccessful attempts) to figure out where we were parking, and even then it was going to involve a very early wake-up to ensure we were legally parked for the day.  By then I was about ready to turn around and go home (or at least was seriously regretting my non-cancellable reservation).  It was not a good hour or so trying to park and unload and get everyone settled in the room.  The hotel was clearly pretty old but very nicely redone.  The lobby was full of character and the elevator was tiny, but we were pretty shocked when we got to our room and saw how cool it was.  I wish we would have had more time to enjoy it!  

I think I finally got to sleep around midnight, but for various reasons (as usual nowadays) I didn't sleep well.  Then I had to wake up at 5:45am to walk down the street and pay for parking.  When we parked in the municipal lot the night before, the parking meter said "Free until 6am" and wouldn't let you pay ahead.  But if it became a pay lot again at 6am, apparently we needed to take care of that!  So, I made myself decent enough and walked down the road just before 6.  It was so incredibly peaceful.  

Mountains!  And you can't see it, but on the other side of that building is Mirror Lake.

Main Street was very quaint, and compared to the busyness the night before, it was a little surreal seeing it empty at sunrise.  This was about 1/3 of the way back to the hotel, and our hotel was the taller building on the left.

We were up for the day by 9 or so, and I wished we had more time to enjoy our balcony!  It only overlooked the parking lot, but it's rare we stay somewhere with one so it was neat.  There were a lot of older hotels in this area with balconies, and a lot fewer cookie cutter chains...hence the trouble finding a reasonable hotel.

The room was pretty cool, too.  We even had a sitting room!  The décor was pretty cool and modern woodsy, too.

The bathroom was on the other side of that blue wall, and had a separate toilet/shower space apart from the sink, which is the best!

I would have shown more, but the room was a mess by morning!

The lobby was cute.  It looked even better at night with white lights and the antler chandelier lit up...but clearly I was in no mood for pictures then!

And they had a bobsled!

We took a stroll down Main Street to find breakfast, and finally settled on a little café that the gluten-free app suggested.  Jacob was able to get an Udi's muffin, we had breakfast sandwiches, and Carter got this monster!

Once we were done, we walked back down the road to visit some of the Olympic-themed shops.  And we saw this...

Mirror Lake looked beautiful, and it was already full of people participating in various water activities.

We eventually made it back down the street to start our day at the Olympic Center!  Carter was excited to find snow and delighted in throwing it to the ground with a big jump.  

The other side of that wall was a sign that said, "It's no miracle - It's real snow!"  It had to be coming from the Zamboni inside, but it was funny to see in 80+ degree temps!

It turned out that there were three rinks in this complex, along with the Winter Olympics museum.  This was the entrance to the original rink from the first time Lake Placid hosted the Olympics.

I got a kick out of these doors to the rink itself, because I'm pretty sure my grandpa was really into Sonja Henie, who won the gold on this rink in 1932. Jack Shea was a local resident who won two gold medals in speed skating and ended up having two more generations of Olympians in his family.

We were eager to take the tour and get the full experience, but even prior, it was pretty amazing to see these doors to the rink where the "Miracle on Ice" happened!

We started our visit with the Winter Olympics Museum.  It was full of Olympic memorabilia, not just from Lake Placid but from other Winter Olympics, as well.  The boys enjoyed some non-ice-based curling...

Apparently Carter came out on top!

They had U.S. opening ceremony uniforms...

And a collection of stuffed mascots...

And, of course, lots of Miracle on Ice memorabilia...

The sport coat is a replica of Herb Brooks' coat from when they filmed the movie "Miracle".  The case below has all of the IDs from the team, plus a gold medal.

Apparently mascot production has made great strides in 40 years, because Roni was a little disturbing.  Even the logo on the shirt looked pretty amateur!

The collection of torches was pretty amazing.  Lake Placid's is the fourth from left.  The really tall one was Lillehammer.  They've gotten decidedly fancier in recent years (far end).

The boys enjoyed sitting in the bobsled...

...and checking out the luge...

The collection of medals was impressive, and who knew that they've also given participation medals since the beginning!

It was soon time to head back upstairs for our tour of the facility, but this post is already way too long, so we're going to break here.  Stay tuned!