Upstate New York (October 2024)

Upstate New York (October 2024)

From MCO to ALB, for the NY reception of friends married in Chicago — Queensbury, Glens Falls, and Lake George — and then a visit to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown before flying home from ALB.

October 13-17, 2024

Highlights include the journey that started pre-dawn at Orlando’s MCO and then flying to ALB with views of Orlando, Central Florida, Charleston, SC, Baltimore Harbor (including the former Key Bridge destroyed by collision with a container ship earlier this year), Philadelphia, New York City’s Central Park and Yankee Stadium, and, finally, ALB Albany International Airport. The Town of Lake George, where I stayed at the Hampton Inn, is within Adirondack Park which includes the Adirondack Mountains, and the whole area was filled with the remarkable fall tree colors. Temperatures stayed in the low 40s, but friends with local roots suggested I visited Martha’s, a famous ice cream stand which opened in 1947 on its final operating day of the season across US Route 9 from Six Flags Great Escape (which opened as Storytown USA in 1954, a year before Disneyland). I got the peanut butter ice cream which I opted to eat in the rental car with the heat on while looking at the carvings next door after having eaten a chicken sandwich at the covered outdoor table.

The hotel room’s balcony provided a great (albeit cold) view of sunrise over the mountains (with a hat tip to the Star Chart App that showed where to expect the sun). It was more than half an hour (switching between outside and inside) waiting for the sun to make it over the mountains to the east. Though only at about 500ft elevation, there were clouds lower than the hotel, hugging the hills/mountains in the distance. Next, a short drive over to the southern shore of Lake George to explore the shore and Fort William Henry. The area is not only quite scenic, especially with the fall colors, but was significant for being part of the pre-revolution French & Indian wars (that led to the British imposed taxes that led to the American revolution). At night, the clear sky provided a view of Jupiter, bright among the stars. The next day, a drive through Glens Falls and across the Cooper’s Cave Bridge over the Hudson River: the cave inspired James Fennemore Cooper’s “The Last of the Mohicans” and its entrance is on an island on the river that can be viewed from a lookout point (but not on this visit).

After spending a night in a “boutique” hotel in Hilton’s Tapestry Collection near Albany International Airport, almost an hour’s drive south of the Lake George area, I made the 90 mile drive to the west for my first ever visit to Cooperstown, NY and the National Baseball Hall of Fame. To memorialize the route there: I took I-90, the New York Throughway for a short way, and US 20 for a much longer way, often the only car on the road, then a two-lane winding state road along the wooded eastern bluffs/shore of Otsego Lake into town where I was even more often the only car on the road. During this “off-season” parking was plentiful (and free during off-season) right next to Doubleday Field (seen in the movie “A League of Their Own,”) named for Abner Doubleday, once said to have created the modern game of baseball at this location, but now acknowledged to be largely a made up story about the legendary Civil War Union major general. The fall colors along the drive were stunning. The captions on the Hall of Fame visit photos tell most of the story: as a former Chicagoan that grew up a Cubs fan, Cubs and even the White Sox are the major focus.

I took an entirely different route for the nearly 90 minute drive back to ALB: a bunch of mostly very scenic 2-lane state roads to the south of my route in the other direction for about half the drive, rarely seeing any modern developments like modern gas stations, fast food places or strip malls, until getting on I-88 for most of the rest of the drive back to I-90 and then the roads leading to the airport rental car return. At ALB, just outside of Gate C2 is a mural tribute to (ad for) the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Out the window at both the airport and some of the flight back to MCO, though technically the Super Moon was the night before, the moon was quite large in the window.

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Page created: July 23, 2026

Last Updated on July 23, 2026