Life: The Day After Black Friday, And Reliving the Grand Adventure

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.

–J.R.R. Tolkien

No, I’m not shopping, today.  Nor did I yesterday.   I did happen by one of the larger malls around here yesterday on my way elsewhere, and noted area of the parking lot filled with cars and humans… an area which normally is not occupied by any higher life form than geese and seagulls. Once again I’m forced to ask myself why humans subject themselves to such nonsense.

I live but a short distance from a mall of similar size to the one I saw yesterday.  This time of year, I go nowhere near that section of town.  There is something about Christmas shopping that creates a substandard driver.  I’ve never figured out what the connection is, but having learned that it exists is enough  to keep me running miles out of my way, to get around it, undamaged.

There are similar places in every city, I suppose.  In Buffalo, the big spot is the Galaria mall. In Syracuse,  it’s the Carousel mall.  in Cleveland it’s the Garfield mall.  Pittsburgh, it’s the Northway mall.  In Toronto, it’s Eaton Center, or a half dozen smaller malls around the GTA. I’ve been to them all.  Nice places.  I wouldn’t get caught dead near any one of them this time of year. I like people well enough, but sometimes removing yourself from them is needful. When they pack themselves into those mazes, I start looking for the exit.

I think, rather, I’m going to take the family on a little adventure out west on The Parkway and check out some of the freshly fallen snow. I’ve always had the impression that a trip out into the first snow of the year, was an exercise in cementing in one’s mind the winner has actually arrived.  This year, the trees in large number have yet to share their leaves.  It has been a weird fall season.  So it is that winter’s arrival needs a bit of additional mental reinforcement.

The parkway, of course, takes  us up to the edge of Lake Ontario.  The lake, this time of year, takes on a slightly different color. Increasingly white/gray. Less friendly.  I suppose that technically the reason is that this guy has also changed color, given the positioning of the sun, the increased clouds, the cold. Ice in the water, too, lends it’s drab colors.  I suppose you would have to be a native of the area to pick up on it.

This is the same road we travel on, when we take the camper to one of the local Parks… Hamlin, Lakeside, and so on, so the change is a stark one, season to season. What was once inviting and green, and blue is now white and grey, and…bleecchcchhh.

Some of my earliest car-riding memories are of traveling on this little stretch of road.  As a family we used to make trips to Alpena MI yearly to visit my father’s sister and her family. We’d leave Rochester early in the morning, (3 or 4am) go up the parkway to Hamlin… where it ended in those days… and out 18 to the Falls… Usually we’d not see any other cars until we got to the border some 65 miles away…. and then we’d go up up the QEW, Kings 2, Kings 53, Kings 81, and so on to Sarnia, and up into Michigan. We’d make it there just past dinner time, if the wind was right. Back in the day it was a fourteen hour drive. No 400’s in Ontario, it was all two lane. Mostly that way in Michigan, too.  Today you can make it in less than eight. A lot faster, these freeways, but they’re not the same trip, anymore. Not nearly as enjoyable.  Not nearly as adventurous.  

When Donna and I got married, (certainly, a grand adventure) … it was the route we chose to start our Honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls, and from there to NY18 and so on, to Toronto.  Sure… I-90 will get you there faster, and we could as easily drive NY104, which was the main drag from here to the Falls before the Thruway went in, in the middle 60’s… but none has the wildlife driven charm of the Parkway. Never know what you’ll see… Deer, Geese, Swans, Herons, Gulls, Turtles, Frogs, Pheasants, turkeys,  and more.

This time of year, of course, about the only thing you’re going to see is the deer… and the hunters.

In any event, I’m not worried about getting somewhere in a hurry, today. It’s the going, not the getting there.  And it’s not a major thing, but it’s useless to deny that  there’s something of a mystique about the road, to me.  A trip up that way, has always been a harbinger of some grand adventure, or other.

The boys have been bugging me to take them railfanning, and I suppose we might do some of that, (Railfanning shots in winter are fun to grab) though I wonder how they’ll fare in the cold. They’re not used to it being winter, yet, either.

Assuming we come home late enough, we might even see some Christmas lights, always a sure sign of winter.

Well, that’s the plan, anyway.   But as Bilbo said… You never know where you’re going to be swept off to, once you start adventuring.