Cayuga Adventure Continued - Finger Lakes Food, Fun, and Floofs!

 

Well, ugh, I've had sort of an unexpectedly rough week here in NYC, so I'm going to take another dip back into my lovely weekend in the Finger Lakes region a couple of weeks ago.

Louise and I had originally talked about getting out for a good paddle after Women Swimmin' wrapped up, but with the high winds, the paddlers (both Kayak Safety Team and the escort boats) all got a bit more of a workout than we usually do. By the time things were winding down at the afterparty at the Ithaca Yacht Club, we were pretty wiped out, and there were solid whitecaps out on the lake so it was going to be energetic paddling conditions. I was still game if Louise was, but when I told her I think I'd phrased my willingness in a less than enthusiastic manner - something like "If you still wanted to paddle I guess I could". She didn't hesitate to say "Nope, but thanks for being willing" and then I said "You know what else sounds good? A nap..." and she said "That sounds perfect". So we went back to her place and did just that and it was just the thing.

Before we went to sleep, though, she'd mentioned something about peach picking. I think I slept for about an hour, then woke up, but not hearing any activity from the sun porch where Louise was (I thought) sleeping, I went back to bed and crashed for what ended up being a couple more hours.

When I woke up again that much late, I thought I'd probably messed up the peach picking expedition, but it turned out that we still had JUST enough time, so off we dashed to the Finger Lakes Cider House. 

This isn't the u-pick type operation I was envisioning when Louise first suggested picking peaches, they have a restaurant and tasting room where where you can try their cider with a nice bite to eat, with most food offerings either grown on the property or sourced from nearby farms. 

And the peaches were LOVELY. This is a variety called "Vivid" - I wonder why? Louise has a friend who works there who'd let us know that these were ready  and heavenly. We each picked a full bag; they were a little bit hard coming off of the trees but a nibble of a windfall promised that they were going to be amazing after a couple of days to ripen. And oh, were they ever. Ate 'em like candy until they were getting so ripe that I wasn't sure I was going to be able to finish them, at which point I took them to Sebago to share after the August Full Moon Paddle. People's faces as they bit into the slices for the first taste were just priceless!  

We went back into the shop to have our peaches weighed and get a bite to eat and a sip of cider - or so we'd thought. But oh, the horror - their lunch service had ended at 4 and the shop was closing at 6. And it was 5:55! 

Well, this turns out to be an excellent way to get yours truly to run quick and buy everything in your shop. Cider, ginger beer, apple liqueur, jam, a "honey flight", cheese, I basically grabbed stuff until I couldn't hold any more. And it was all delicious! 

We packed up the goodies and headed back towards Louise's place, where she had plans for a most delicious salad with chicken and beets and cranberries (oh my), but then she mentioned something about a nearby place called Brews and Brats. Nothing fancy, nothing pretentious, just brews and brats, popular with local folks. I thought that sounded fantastic so off we went.

This was something local, I wish I could remember because it was very nice.

Their lot was literally carved out of a cornfield, as you can see. And oh, the brats, and oh, the baked beans (appropriately called OMG Baked Beans) and oh, the German potato salad. And with 2 sides I had enough left after getting completely stuffed for a great little breakfast the next morning. 

After dinner, we adjourned to Taughannock Falls State Park for one of the wonderful entries in their summer concert series, the popular local band Maddy Walsh and the Blind Spots.  

Another nice evening by Cayuga Lake with some good music and...

oh my...

Oh, the floof. Hello there. Hey Louise - can you remind me, are we here to hear music, or pet dogs? 

Oh, definitely here to pet dogs. No question!

A few of my Finger Lakes goodies, everything was delicious

And I got utterly silly with the Honey Flight earlier this week. Buckwheat, with its distinctly stronger flavor, remains my favorite Mainland honey. Would still trade it for Hawaiian kiawe honey, which tastes like small-kid-time memories, but in the absence of that, I do love the buckwheat!

Women Swimmin' 2019 - A Big Success on a Challenging Day

Trusty Romany likes car rides!

Time for a trip in, if not the Wayback Machine, at least the Back A Couple Weeks Machine.

After skipping last year's Women Swimmin' For Hospicare because of grievous levels of overscheduling, I was delighted to head back to Cayuga Lake this year. I've loved participating in this event since the year when my friend Louise, who organizes the Kayak Safety Team for the event, first invited me to come out. 

Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of the swim itself or the after party this year, so you just get a writeup. I was running late for the early morning "Star Meeting" (so called because the Kayak Safety Team meets on the water and raft up with our bows all touching in the center, making a star-shaped formation, for last intructions) and in my scramble I left my camera in the car. The event had a bit of an extra challenge this year in the form of a wind forecast that was higher than perfect, starting at 8-10 mph and going up from there, and coming from the NW, giving a fetch (distance wind travels over water, which correlates directly with the size that the resulting waves can get to be) of over 30 mile. Everybody really needed to be at that meeting to make sure we had all of our final instructions before things got going. 

The Kayak Safety Team was going to be OK with the forecasted winds - everybody in that group is an experienced paddler paddling a sea kayak, a craft designed to handle conditions much worse than that - but Louise was rightly concerned about the boats that actually escort the swimmers. That group ends up being a much more diverse set of craft, paddled by people with a much wider range of skills. There are a lot of recreational kayaks in this group, which can run into some trouble if the water gets choppy enough to start splashing into the cockpit - the more water it takes on, the harder it gets to handle. Less experienced canoe paddlers can also have trouble as wind and chop picks up. Also, this is not a race, it's a social swim; some of the swimmers would be fine if things got choppy but some of them might need help. 

The senior safety folks (including Louise, which is part of why we went in separate cars and I ended up being late) actually meet at 5:15 to make the go/no go decision. The forecast looked like there would just be time for the women to do their swimmin' before things got too rough, so they made the "go" decision - but I'm sure there were a lot of fingers being crossed and wood being knocked. 

And everything worked out OK - but not by a whole lot. Probably the best call of the day was to kick off the swim a good bit early, I don't remember by how much but I think it was between 15 minutes and half an hour early. The busses (oh, there was a really sweet story about the bus drivers but I'll tell that in another post) had gotten the first group of swimmers there, the escort boaters for the first "pods" were there, so the word was given to get 'em going. And they did, and that may well have saved the swim for the last few swimmers - the wind was picking up and conditions were approaching seriously borderline right at the end.

For all that, the escort boaters all did an especially great job this year. I've done a few of these now and I've never seen the swimmers stay on such a straight course to the yacht club as they did this year.  A line of buoys is set out to mark the course, and ranges and markers of various sorts have been used at the yacht club, but it's hard for a swimmer to see very far while they're swimming, it's really up to their escort boats to guide them, and that went so well. In addition, in other years I've done this, the Kayak Safety Team kept pretty busy getting swimmers who'd broken from their "pods" because they were either too fast or too slow matched up with a group that's a better fit (one hard and fast rule in Women Swimmin' is that no one swims alone) - this year the escort boaters were really taking care of a lot of that themselves, and filling the KST in as they did so. Excellent group of boaters all around this year!

As the wind picked up towards the end, things got roughest in the middle of the lake, of course, and the very last swimmers were given the very unusual offer of a lift on a jetski to the last course marker before the Ithaca Yacht Club, where they come ashore. A couple of them who were finding the going rough accepted; the ones who didn't were well attended as the Kayak Safety Team joined up with the escort boaters as the last swimmers came across. I'd been keeping an eye on one swimmer at the point the ride offer came out; she'd been laughing and joking with her escort so I was pretty sure she wouldn't take it, and that was the case. She had a couple of escort boaters with her in rec boats and although it was getting bouncy out there, they were doing great too, riding over the waves without letting their boats get swamped.
That swimmer ended up finishing last, because the swimmers behind her had taken rides; it turned out it was her birthday and she'd been talking this up big and had a lot of family waiting for her at the finish line. Louise radioed that information and as the swimmer approached the yacht club, the Yardvarks (the band that plays at the party at the finish line) launched into "Today's Your Birthday". Such a fun way to wrap up a day that had really begun with a lot of concern.

Final stats for the day - 340 swimmers, 170 escort boats, 172 volunteers, and over $410K raised for Hospicare of Tompkins County. The most swimmers, and the most money raised, on the most challenging day of any of the swims with which I've helped out. I'm so proud to have been a part of it - and congratulations and thanks to Louise and all the other organizers for a wonderful day! 

8/12/2017 A Surprisingly Splendid Women Swimmin'

Finally a weekend with a taste of the summer I'd been hoping to have, during my annual trip to Ithaca to help out with the wonderful Women Swimmin' for Hospicare fundraising event. My amazing Antarctic kayak guide friend Louise  first introduced me to this event back in 2013, asking me if I might be interested in coming to help out as part of the Kayak Safety Team, a group of skilled paddlers who line the course and keep an eye on things, helping out with things like matching up swimmers who turn out to swim at a different pace as the rest of their "pod" (small groups of swimmers who set out with a absolute minimum of two escort paddlers, generally more) with a group that they can stay with better, providing a brief respite for a tired swimmer, and the like. I enjoyed it so much the first time that I've made an annual thing out of it, even last year - no, ESPECIALLY last year when I myself was just coming out of being treated (succesfully so far!) for breast cancer.

The best year was probably 2014, when instead of driving back to Brooklyn, I drove to Waterford, dropped off my boat and camping gear on the Erie Canal, ditched my rental car with Enterprise in Albany, took a cab back to my boat and then paddled home to Brooklyn. I don't really do that bucket list thing but a solo trip down the Hudson River Water Trail had been a pipe dream of mine ever since I'd read a book by a professional adventure-travel guy who did a solo paddle the length of the Hudson, but didn't really like either the Hudson or paddling by himself. 2014 the workload, the currents (the Hudson is tidal so that's key), and the date of Women Swimmin' all came together perfectly, and boy was that a wonderful way to get home. Last year was also pretty special, being my own year of surviving cancer.

This year, Louise was out of town the weekend of the swim, but she made arrangements for me to stay at her place, and that worked out fine. I made my plans to take my usual 3-day weekend, and reserved a car, and scrambled to finish the massive licensor forecast that was due on the 15th, and packed my bag, but as I mentioned in my last post, with one thing and another, this summer hasn't been quite the summer I'd hoped for, and in the last few days before the  weekend, it was looking like my much-anticipated Women Swimmin' weekend had a good chance of following that trend.

In addition to paddling for the event, which is a fun, non-competitive 1.2 mile swim across Cayuga Lake, I'd been especially dreaming of swimming myself at this beautiful spot at the north end of Taughannock State Park, where you can swim along a cliff and past a waterfall, and during the late nights at work finishing up the forecast, I kept picturing myself swimming there and that kept me going.

But then I started looking at the forecast, and it was terrible - all rain and thunderstorms all weekend - and then I looked at the Women Swimmin' site one morning and noticed a "Blue-Green Algae Update" button and when I hit that I found out that Cayuga had been having a blue-green algae problem this summer, beaches had been closed, and that the swim would be called off on the morning of the 12th if an early-morning inspection of the course revealed any signs of the stuff.

I wouldn't have thought of backing out at that point, I'd promised I would be there, but I was worried. Trying to make the best of it, I packed up a couple of books and some art supplies; earlier in the spring, a friend at work had given me some watercolor crayons that I haven't had a chance to try out yet and a rainy Saturday afternoon in Ithaca seemed like a perfect chance to try that, and I also figured that if it was still raining on Sunday I would just head home in the morning and have a quiet Sunday evening at home.

So how did it all work out?

Surprisingly well!

The blue-green algae hadn't been seen much in the south end of the lake; some friendly Cornell science folks had been keeping an eye on things for the event, and their morning check revealed fine clear water for the swim, and as a matter of fact the need for that check meant participants got to sleep in a bit (usually we're arriving while it's still dark, but they needed daylight to make sure the course was clear so our time to meet on the water for our pre-swim talk was a relatively civilized 6:30 a.m.), and then the thunderstorms and rain that were predicted went elsewhere. The weather during the swim was just beautiful, and then some clouds moved in towards the end of the post-swim festivities; I'd been thinking of going to do my own swim right after the event, but when the clouds came in I figured this was the leading edge of the bad weather and gave in to a sudden desire to go back to Louise's for a nap, only stopping at the Taughannock Falls Overlook for a few pictures of the falls.

At this point, Sunday morning was looking like it was supposed to be nicer so I figured I would swim then, but then when I woke up it was beautiful again, so I threw on a swimsuit and grabbed my goggles and headed back to the lake, where I ignored the "beach closed for blue-green algae" signs (this beach was not far from the event course so I figured if one was OK the other probably was too, and the water looked fine) and went for the exact swim I'd been daydreaming about all week (even better, in fact, I'd forgotten about the waterfall).

And there was a perfect finish to the day, too, one of the other Kayak Safety Team folks had told me that there was a free concert in the park that night and that he and his wife and some friends of theirs were going and that I was welcome to join them if I wanted to. I'd originally had some vague plans about having dinner at a nice farm-to-table restaurant in Trumansburg that I'd found on the internet, but with the weather having totally relented and an afternoon swim having worked out so nicely, I put that on the back burner for another trip, picked up a chicken spiedie sub ("spiedies" are a regional specialty and I'd never tried them before, quite tasty), and headed back to the park for some good music from The Pelotones.

Really couldn't have asked for a much nicer day. BTW, I'm kind of the worst fundraiser in the world, I mostly donate my skills for this event, but every boater in the event does get a donor page, and if you were inclined to donate a little something to this good cause, here's mine, late donations are accepted!

Here are some pictures from the swim, which at last report (via email, the website hasn't quite caught up yet) has raised $408K for Hospicare of Tompkins County. As usual, click on any photo for a slideshow view. I don't have any mobile devices and I go mostly incommunicado when I travel, so I didn't hear about the terrible things that happened on the same day until I got home on Sunday, but I'm glad to have been part of something so solidly good that day.