Lake Placid

This is a cute little town in the Adirondacks. Actually, the town itself is pretty nondescript, but it's mercifully low on chain stores. There's a Gap and EMS and a Bass outlet, but everything else is local shops, and though there's a Starbucks and a Quiznos, most people shun them. The town's economy runs on the glow of the 1980 (and to a lesser extent 1932) Winter Olympics. We like the ice rinks and speed skating oval, and the bobsled/luge track is fun when there's a race, and sometimes there's a competition of the ski jump. The ski mountain, Whiteface, is nice too.

Our favorite attraction is the toboggan chute. They took the 1932 ski jump ramp and put it next to the lake and you rent a toboggan for 5 bucks and and a couple of burly guys pack your family onto it and push you down the ramp. You fly down screaming and slide about a quarter mile across the lake. This is one of the most fun things I've ever done.

I should note that the town of Lake Placid (known to the scruffier towns around here as Lake Plastic) is not actually on Lake Placid. It's on Mirror Lake. This is a curious pattern in the area, where the city of Saranac Lake is on Lake Flower and Tupper Lake is not on any lake at all.

But the big thing for us is the lake and mountain views and the air. I know back in the pre-antibiotic days they used to send people with tuberculosis up here to cure them, and there is definitely something about the air that makes me feel incredibly healthy. No matter how bad I'm feeling when when we arrive it has never failed to improve my energy and my mood.

Today was a pretty typical winter day for me here. I walked around Mirror Lake, which takes around 40 minutes. Then I gathered up the kiddies and took them to ski. I skied too, then came back to the condo we rented and napped and hung out until dinner at one of the convivial and mediocre restaurants that dot the main street. The best food in town is at a little restaurant next to the Price Chopper supermarket and at a deli that bakes its own bread and has a kickass Sunday brunch.

The main lift at Whiteface is a gondola, so you spend 5 minutes in a small space with 7 other people, so there are little social dos and don'ts. I had to make a quick phone call and asked if people minded my using my phone for a moment. The others were so thrilled that I was polite enough to ask that I probably could have done a dozen major business transactions without anyone minding. One big thing is that if you offer your skiing buddy gum you have to offer it everyone in the gondola ("did you bring enough for everybody?"). And it's always okay to ask "where are you from?" The first day I had people form Philly, Quebec, Princeton and Germany. Today I had a group of college buddies who'd diasporaed (that's a word, right?) to California, Florida, Virginia and New York.

In the lodge we saw a kind of fashion show. A bunch of guys come in wearing ski shorts, I didn't even know they made ski shorts, with brightly colored tights underneath which they proceed to remove and change into regular clothes, right in the food court. No nudity, but still pretty entertaining.

Once again, I find myself the only male being in a group of 6. I think if the ratio were reversed we would not have watched the Bratz movie last night.