At long last, here are the promised pictures from the Multi Family Summer Vacation of Doom mu-hahahaha! We went with Jersey family up to Lake George, NY for a week. On the way up, we had some time to kill, so we stopped by the
Schyler (pronounced "skyler") Mansion. He was one of Washington's generals. He was also very fond of the kick-ass wall treatment (sorry for the blurry pic):
This particularly impressive one wrapped all the way around the second floor central common area:
It was a sort of "oriental" scene with lush foliage and birds and lots and lots and lots of mosques. We learned that the origin of the phrase "sleep tight" referred to the ropes that mattresses rested on (no box springs back then I guess).
Slack ropes meant a sagging, uncomfy bed. Not sure what was going on with the wooden cross on this kid's bed. Vampire revolutionaries, maybe?
We visited a couple of New York's French and Indian War forts (cue the
fiddle music from Last of the Mohicans.) Fort William Henry, or the recreation built on its ruins, is right on the shores of Lake George and therefore, not surprisingly, smack in the middle of a tourist swarm. I played with the landscape button on my camera.
The tour groups had dispersed to different parts of the fort by then, hence the emptiness, but I swear there were crowds of people there, really! Jersey Boy got himself recruited.
The recruiter made it easy. See the X? No literacy necessary. And he got a coin too! Woot!
Fort Ticonderoga was farther off the beaten path, though still on the lake of course, for reasons of
strategery:
It was built by the French as Fort Carillon, facing south onto Lac du Saint Sacrement (now Lake George) since south was where all the Brits were. When the British captured the fort and the lake, they renamed both, and moved the guns to the back of the fort to face north, since that's where all the French were.
I played with the landscape setting some more, this time with less success.
The two Union Jacks on the left are really the same flag. I didn't align photo 1 (left side) with photo 2 (middle) properly, making the fort a few yards wider and twice as British than in real life. Oh well. I will blame it on the difficulty of seeing the camera's LCD display clearly on a bright sunny day.
Surprisingly, Ticonderoga had a nice collection of textile tools.
I guess there must have been womenfolk living here too. I've heard that sailors in the old days knitted, but it's hard to believe that redcoats spun yarn when they weren't marching around.
Adjacent to the fort was the King's Garden, which we all enjoyed. There were the requisite formal geometric bits, which you can see if you peek into the walled portion:
But they also had a veggie garden, a children's garden, a greenhouse, not to mention a dramatic walkway lined with tall tall trees. Que romantico!
There was a wedding in this one, so we couldn't go in. We then went to La Ronde (it's a Six Flags really, but with a nicer name) to watch one of the fireworks show.
The rain held off just until the show was about to start and then it proceeded to pour and pour. Thanks, rain! The show was pretty, though, even through the wet. You'll have to take my word for that, because photography was not allowed. It's just as well because my camera would have been totally soaked. There was, of course, the obligatory eating-of-the-poutine.
It's pretty darned tasty. You have to admire a culture whose first impulse, when faced with something already pretty rich (i.e. french fries), is to cover it in cheese curds and smother it with gravy.
We even brought the rain clouds with us.
