placid vacation

In both name and feel... we are just back from a week spent at a cabin on a lake near Lake Placid.

(The post last week was an experiment with the scheduled post feature on Blogger... worked exactly as it was supposed to!)

Olympic fever is a dominant feature in Lake Placid. (Lake Placid hosted two winter Olympics, in 1932 and again in 1980.) I thought I would have little to no interest. I thought wrong. One tour through the Olympic Museum had me hooked on all things Olympic, and all the athletes in training, despite the season, made it all the more real.

We managed to see ski jumpers in action on the smaller of the two jumps. An elevator ride to the top of the larger ski jump offered a unique view of what a ski jumper sees just prior to taking off. They must have nerves of steel.

(The smaller ski jump can be glimpsed on the right. The white tracks are special tiles with slots as wide as the skis, continually watered to provide a slick surface for the skiers. The green mats at the bottom had plastic fingers that approximated the feel of a snowy landing.)

The boys took a run on the bobsled, which travels on the track first built for the 1932 Olympics and then used again in 1980.

The course is challenging enough -- as you may imagine -- that it requires a trained driver and brakeman to negotiate, and the boys were just along for the ride. That's them coming down the final curve of the track of their run.

We walked all the way down the new bobsled/luge/skeleton run, which was another awe-inspiring perspective.

Of course there was hiking too; can't go to a place that has mountains and not want to get to the top of at least one of them.

On the top of Mount Jo, with Mount Marcy (I think) in the background to the right.

For my boys to truly enjoy a vacation, there must be fishing. They had plenty of it, catching (and releasing) sunnies, small mouth bass, large mouth bass and golden shiners to their heart's content, which in this case was around 75 fish.

My suspicion is that it was the same five dumb fish over and over again.

And for me? This picture pretty much sums up my week:

A good bit of knitting done, in relative peace and quiet. It was bliss.