And the usual final handful of observations to wrap up my visit to Rochester.
First, THERE ARE WIND FARMS IN THE CATSKILLS!
I’m driving along Route 17, enjoying the nice landscape that surely looks amazing in the fall when the leaves are changing colors (and not in early April when the buds have yet to appear). I round a bend, and OMG WIND TURBINES looming over the next hill in the distance! It was quite startling, actually. Those things are HUGE. Continue reading
The other museum you should make time to visit is the Eastman House. A major museum dedicated to the art of photography and film has been built on to the home of George Eastman, the man who made it all possible.
Of course, if I’m going to be driving for half a day to a place, I’m going to want to make sure that there’s more than one reason to be going there. Experiencing a total solar eclipse at a winery, no matter how awesome that might be, isn’t enough to justify the trip.
Fortunately, Rochester is a big enough city to have plenty of things to see and do. While I do maintain that any community, no matter how small, is going to have at least one point of interest, if you’re going to make a vacation trip there, you want your destination to be big enough to be home to at least one or two minor league professional sports teams.
While Rochester is the home to the Red Wings (the AAA affiliate of the Washington Nationals) as well as teams in other sports, the one attraction that is unique to the city is the Strong National Museum of Play – also known as the Toy Museum.
“I can drive to the path of totality!” I said. “And in just one day! I’ll make a vacation out of it!”
I think I wound up in the only place in New York where the skies were completely overcast. Sunday was beautiful; mild temperatures and completely clear skies. Tuesday was unseasonably warm, with a few scattered clouds and a high, thin haze.
But on Eclipse Day, at 3:15 in the afternoon…..
Not pictured: Old man yelling
And because of the cloud cover, almost all of the eclipse phenomena – sudden drop in temperature, weird animal behavior – didn’t happen. All we got was the “twilight all the way around the horizon”.
Looking towards the City of Rochester
We also noted that it seemed to get lighter much faster than it got dark….
Well, at least the Casa Larga Vineyards had a very nice “Toast to Totality” event. I might have stayed there a bit longer (it lasted to 5 pm), but a little after four o’clock, a light drizzle started.
Ya know, I’m not sure I care for all these wineries becoming “event spaces” with sales rooms attached to them. I’d love to chat with the winery staff (NOT the sales staff) about their vines and grapes and how they deal with pests and how they are coping with global warming. Or how it seems that there are so many competitions these days that pretty much any winery can win some medals, or how a person’s particular sense of taste might affect how they enjoy a particular wine – there might be an equivalent to “color blindness” for taste, and we do know that your sense of hearing changes as you get older…. I suppose they’ve got to make extra money somehow…..
But anyway, my trip to Rochester wasn’t a complete waste – I made plans to do other things there, and I’ll tell you about them in the next few posts.
Pure Blather 