Slept wonderfully and enjoyed my early morning 4 miler before breakfast. As there really isn’t 4 miles of village in which to run, I inevitably wound up in the countryside where I heard a rooster, found the country club and polo fields, and watched the sun rise over the lake.
Then we had to navigate the new breakfast arrangements. There were many folks at breakfast and we had yet to meet the inn keeper. Even now, I’m not sure we have! There was plenty of coffee, cold cereal, and pastries out and then we were given a choice of blueberry pancakes and sausage or fried eggs and sausage. We opted for the latter and when asked my toast preference, I reminded the nice young woman about my gluten free status and she offered me GF waffles if I was interested. I responded that I was fine with eggs and I then received two eggs over medium with sausage…. and toast…. together…. {sigh} Luckily they also had yogurt available so I got to try the new GF granola I bought in the grocery store across the street last night (it is yummy) in my yogurt.
Undaunted, we set out for a hike! Off to Fillmore Glen falls at the base of Owasco Lake – one of the smaller finger lakes. There are several such state parks in the area – the best known would be Watkins Glen – but this one was supposedly the closest to it’s original state. It was quite lovely and would have been stunning had there been more water. The landscape was shale and there were sheer walls comprised of layers of rock with plants and trees growing out of them and small slopes of shale chips along the way. There were bridges crossing the creek and a few places where stairs had been constructed but otherwise, it was pretty rustic as well as rustically pretty. We followed the gorge trail in then climbed up and hiked back the north rim trail through the wonderful pine forest for about a 3.5 mile round trip. Just what the doctor ordered!
Then we were off to see what was to be seen. We cut across to the shore of Cayuga Lake and paid a short visit to Aurora – a lovely little village which is home to Wells College. It is a very small but lovely little college that was reminiscent of Pepperdine except the buildings were red brick and not sandstone, the hills not quite so steep and the water was lake instead of ocean. We found a cute little pub where we cold eat lunch and while
the initial appeal is probably obvious, we were quite pleased with the choice. I had a lovely Greek salad with grilled chicken, Gillian enjoyed her buffalo chicken finger sandwich (yes, that’s right – fried chicken strips covered in buffalo wing sauce on a bun!) and Frank had the most amazing variation on a grilled cheese sandwich involving three kinds of cheese, bacon, jalapeno aoli, roasted red peppers and foccacia.
It was then time to proceed north up the side of Cayuga Lake and see what other quaint villages we could visit. The answer, unfortunately, seemed to be “none.” Union Springs and Cayuga were small hamlets with no intrinsic charm that we could see and no where we could procure dessert. We headed farther north around the top of the lake and what do you know? We stumbled on a winery! And this one had a distillery associated with it too! What a find! I’m not sure we held out much in the way of expectations for Montezuma’s Winery but we were pleasantly surprised! None of their traditional varietals were much to write home about but the Cayuga White (a grape variety engineered at Cornell) was very nice and slightly fruity. They also had wonderful fruit wine including a black currant and apple wine (which fuels this missive) and a sparkling rhubarb wine with which Frank was quite taken. They also distilled vodka from honey! It was very clean tasting with just a hint of the source and so a bottle of that was also procured.
Then the wandering continued. Gillian is being quite the trooper, standing by patiently while her parents imbibe and so we launched a search for a reward: chocolate! Not just Hershey bars from the grocery store but real gourmet chocolate. Off to Seneca Falls which seemed like a good tourist place to find such things…. and probably is when the main streets aren’t completely under construction! Next stop: Waterloo. It has a bigger dot on our tourist map so therefore it must be a good candidate for a chocolate shop. Nope. Okay, we’ll keep heading west to Geneva – we’re now at the head of Seneca Lake which is one of the biggest and boasts the most wineries per shoreline mile. It actually had quite a nice downtown area where we found a gourmet chocolate shop selling monster marshmallows dipped in dark chocolate and a local florist selling local chocolates including chocolate espresso truffles and 70% cocoa dark chocolate – mission accomplished! We wandered about a bit more and contemplated visiting Bellhurst Castle (which is also a winery!) but decided we were too far west and needed to head back.
We opted for the throughway to avoid the construction at Seneca Falls and got off to visit the town of Weedsport where we had seen advertisements for a local farm based winery. We found acres of berry bushes obscuring a shack like structure with the signage for “pick your own blueberries” competing for space with “Giancarelle Bros Winery.” That should have been our first clue. But Gillian was thrilled with the idea of picking blueberries while we did a wine tasting and she grabbed a bucket and left. This was before we realized that the wine tastings were being doled out in small plastic medicine cups and that none of the wines we tasted would actually taste like wine and there was no where to pour out the vinegary substances so we had to actually finish them so as not to appear rude. In short, it was awful. Disgusting. Blech.
We used finding Gillian as an excuse to escape and dashed out of the shack into the acres of bushes. We found her quite easily and could have departed quickly but we found, much to our surprise, that it was really fun to pick blueberries! None of us had ever done it before so we spent the next 20 minutes filling her bucket and thoroughly enjoying the activity. Who knew?
We headed back to the homestead and wandered around town in search of the evening repast and wound up at Joe’s Pasta Garage – a little pizza place offering GF pizza! So twice in one week I find really nice GF pizza – definitely hand-thrown crust as it was too uneven to have come from the freezer – and they even had Redbridge so I could have pizza and beer. Gillian opted for another buffalo chicken themed meal, mine was roasted chicken with spinach and pesto (I’ll smell like garlic for a week) and Frank had the pastrami sandwich. Sound boring? Far from it! I was actually jealous because the restaurant cured the pastrami themselves, shaved it thin, and served it on a brioche roll with some reuben-like sauce, caraway cucumbers (kinda like pickles) and deep fried potato salad. Yes, I typed that right. I was jealous!
We definitely needed to walk off some of those carbs – Gillian managed lava cake for desert but she was the only one of us – so we explored the village on the other side of the lake. We wandered by St. James Episcopal Church advertising their outdoor service lakeside on Sunday – which is what we stumbled upon several years ago and led us to be enamored of this village. Unfortunately, we’ll be in Canada on Sunday but maybe someday…
So with the hike and the big lake house gawking expedition after dinner, we managed a whopping 20,052 steps or 8.75 miles today! Unexpected food find: Frank likes blueberries! After 25 years in this country insisting that he doesn’t like blueberries (but tolerating them in muffins when he had to), he tasted them straight off the bush today and decided that he might actually like them!