Discover New York ~ 2 Week Trip ~ Part 3

July 25th-28th

Malone/Watkins Glen

We left Buffalo and headed out for Malone, NY. This was about a half a day’s drive. It took us around 6 hours. The roads in New York are not well maintained and  people do not exceed the speed limit so it felt like a longer drive than it actually was.

We arrived at High Falls campground around 3 pm. We had booked at this campground because there is a 120 foot waterfall on site. There are 127 camp sites with full hookup. There’s a pool, playground, picnic area and events pavilion. In spite of the waterfall, pictured below, we were not impressed with this campground overall. First off it is mostly a seasonal camping campground. Which means that most of the campers live there year round and it feels kind of like a trailer park. They do have the overnight campers in a different section than the seasonal campers which is good. The campsites do not offer much in the way of privacy and there was loud music playing till around 10-11 pm on Friday night at one of the pavilions. It was posted in their literature that this would probably be the case. We went to the waterfall which was pretty impressive util you turned away from the falls and saw the trash and old falling down building on the bank. The walk to and from the falls was enjoyable though.

Time out for a little hilarious story. Being that we were in a town so close to the Canadian border, and just south of Montreal, which is French speaking Canada, more than half of the tv stations were in French and there were very few station to choose from. So we spent the evening watching Transformers in French with English subtitles. This got David very curious about the French language so he downloaded a translation app. He spent the whole next morning making and sending snapchats in French to our daughter telling her we missed her. Oh, how I wish I had video of this because it was quite hilarious! He would try his hardest to say her name in a French accent “Saavaanough. Je t’aime. Tu me manque.” Trust me it was hilarious!

At this point you may be wondering why we decided to go to Malone, NY. It’s just this tiny town in the middle of nowhere, literally 15 minutes from the Canadian border. Not much there except one thing and that leads us to confession time. I am a Little House on the Prairie fan and one of my bucket list goals is to visit each LHOTH site. I’ve already been to the original LHOTP site in Kansas and so we found ourselves in Malone to visit Almanzo Wilder’s boyhood home & farm. This is the place that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about in Farmer Boy. 

We arrived at the farm right before they opened for the day and were able to be in the first tour.

Our tour guide was a teacher who lives in Arizona but comes here every summer to conduct these tours and let me tell you he knows his Wilder history! 

He gave us a full tour of the barns and house. We were encouraged to ask questions and touch items that he invited us to touch. 

Me in front of the barns

Me pumping water out of the well

Front & side views of the house.

The next morning we packed up and left, we were on our way the Finger Lakes region of New York. We arrived at Watkins Glen State park. I very highly recommend this state park. The beauty of it is so hard to describe and the pictures that follow, as beautiful as they are do not do it justice.

This state park campground was a little bit of a challenge. They do not offer water, electricity or sewer. You are dry docked and must depend on your batteries and tanks while you are staying there. They do have water stations set up between every few campsites to refill tanks and they have a dump station. You may run your generator twice a day for a couple of hours in the morning and then again in the afternoon. You’ll need to do this to recharge your batteries.

The great thing about his park and most especially the section we stayed in; the Oneida Village, is that we were within walking distance of the gorge. And the gorge is why you want to visit this area. Have you seen Lord of the Rings? Picture the elven city of Rivendell and that will give you an idea of what this place is like. There are several trails you can walk in the gorge but if you can only choose one choose the Gorge Trail. It is 1.5 miles one way and offers 19 waterfalls. Below I’ve posted several different pictures from the trail.

This is a picture of a waterfall from inside a cave. Awesome!

MANY MANY stairs to climb

Underneath Rainbow Falls at Sunset

We also visited Lake Seneca which was beautiful. We drove down to the lake just before sunset and got some amazing pictures.

David & I on Lake Seneca

Pano of Lake Seneca

We had had an amazing experience at Watkins Glen and in the morning we planned on heading out to our final destination on our 2 week trip. I think Hercules may be getting homesick. :)