Neither here nor there

Saturday was limbo day. Not the good kind of limbo where the fun music plays and you bend yourself under bars; the kind where you are between places and have nowhere to go.

Lake Placid weekly leases are clear and consistent. You check in at 4:00 on Saturday and out at 10:00 the following Saturday. Houses must be cleaned, things rearranged. We knew this was coming, but we'd never experienced it before. So what do you do with 6 hours in Lake Placid without a place to be? As much as we love the place, there are a limited number of things to do here and an even more limited number of places to go within easy driving distance.

So what do we do? Well, we take our time getting out of the first house. We probably could have stayed longer. By the time we left at 10:45 the cleaners still hadn't shown up, and we probably could have hung out on the dock without them even noticing we were there. But leave we did.

First we went to town to get some coffee. While there, we met a couple who had showed up in Lake Placid for a wedding and hadn't realized that it was black tie, and could we tell them where they could possibly find dress shirt and a bow tie and cummerbund. I've never even seen anyone is sports coat here, but we suggested a couple of places they might try and we saw later that we steered them right.

From there we went over to the nicest hotel in town to see if we could get a massage in their spa. They had something available a little later, so we went to the one decent sized town near here and walked around (and saw somewhere that sold bow ties and cummerbunds), checked out the farmer's market, had a surprisingly good slice of pizza and then headed back for our massages.

I work my legs really hard here. I've ridden 10-25 miles on my bike every day except one, a total of about 150 miles. I also walk the 3 miles or so around the lake every day. So not surprisingly I had some soreness, which I had the massage therapist attack, which she did with vigor (a lot more elbow and forearm than hands). The pain involved in a deep tissue massage is intense and difficult to describe, but you put up with it the best you can because you trust in the end it will make you feel better. In this case, it really did and I haven't returned to that level of soreness since, in spite of my best efforts to induce it.

Finally, we went up to see John Brown's farm. John Brown, you may recall, was the crazed abolitionist who let a raid on a US army depot in Harper's Ferry, MD, which set off a chain of events leading to the Civil War. For whatever reason, he actually lived here. He had a farm in a beautiful spot where he and his very fertile wives (one at a time) had 20(!) children. Yes, the second wife had 13 children. Pretty hard to imagine. Three of his sons died with him in the Harper's Ferry raid and the 4 of them are buried on the farm. As we were looking at the gravesite, I got an email saying the new house was ready, so off we went to unpack once more.