Our room in the tower of the Hochelaga Inn will sit vacant tonight; Audrey’s COVID test results arrived just after lunchtime today, but we’re still waiting on mine and can’t cross into Canada until they get here. There are definitely worse fates than being forced to spend a day in the Thousand Islands region of upstate New York, but it would have been mighty cool to have two nights in the tower of a 150 year old mansion, so hopefully my results arrive tomorrow and we can salvage at least one night.
Aside from waiting for COVID results, today’s main event was driving through the Adirondack State Park and enjoying the fall color. We stopped for one short hike in the Nature Conservancy’s Lake Julia Preserve, where I was super excited to go for a walk in this little-used area. Audrey, on the other hand, was convinced that either murderers or bears would ensure we didn’t return alive. In her defense, she is fearless around spiders and other things that make me uneasy, but I wasn’t going to miss out on a nice hike due to imagined murderers, so she shuddered her way through the forest until the path opened up at a beautiful pond surrounded by trees in various stages of changing color and she forgot about psychopaths and started photographing everything in sight.
With luck the poor souls at Quest Labs will pull my test out of whatever mountain they are buried under first thing tomorrow and the trip will continue, otherwise we may be writing tomorrow night from another location in New York as we seek out alternative routes west.
