New England – Fall 2010 – Day 8 : Saranac Lake to Watertown

The only arrangement offered at the hotel for breakfast was the restaurant next door to the hotel but we had already found it to be expensive so we had plan B to fall back on. We packed up and checked out we drove up the main street to the service station and bought a breakfast roll from the Subway franchise inside.
Having eaten we returned to the car and checked out our options on the way to Watertown. We inserted the addresses of various attractions into the SatNav and checked the distances involved and times estimated to visit them. Out of several possibilities the Wild Center was the nearest and had the extra bonus of being broadly in the correct direction – we logged in the details and set off.
The directions were good and we arrived at the Wild Center, AKA the Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks. This is a natural history museum that opened July 4, 2006 in New York state's Adirondack Park The museum occupies a 31-acre site in the town of Tupper Lake, New York, the approximate geographic center of the six million acre Adirondack Park. The museum features live exhibits and live animals, including river otters, birds, amphibians and fish. There’s an indoor waterfall and river, towering glacial ice wall, high-definition films, and wide-screen theatre on 31-acre trail-filled campus. The new museum mixes up the indoors and outdoors. There are waterfalls inside, and exhibit labels in the woods outside. Indoors a marsh appears to flow into a real pond that laps at the outside of the building, and the calls of live owls and otters mix with the splashing cascade of a trout-filled indoor stream. High definition films explore the region and showcase fascinating reports from field scientists researching everything from moose to loons to alpine summits.
We decided that since it was raining again, we would limit ourselves to the inside exhibits and they were good value. To be fair we both enjoyed the female otter which decided to put on a display of speed swimming in her private pool – her turns and flips were rather too quick for my camera/reflexes and I now have a great series of shots of disturbed water and a flash of tail leaving the picture.
I was less impressed than Julia, the geologist, with the working model of a glacier breaking up, but I suppose I should be grateful that Julia has a soft spot for old things that creak, moan and fall apart!
It was overall a brilliantly put together educational experience and I’m sure if Julia was still teaching she would be planning a Rosliston School field trip as we speak.
We watched a film about the re-establishment of the Moose into the Adirondacks and I resisted the temptation to try and get a convincing photo of the filmed moose to try and persuade people that we had seen one for real. After a while I became less self-critical because we decided that all the film coverage was of one moose, possibly an uncharacteristically extrovert amongst its kind.
One piece of information which lingers with me is that, if I remember it correctly, the Adirondacks wolf was hunted to extinction and that, in itself, caused a population explosion of its prey species and then in turn the coyote population increased as there was less competition for their prey, now studies of coyote DNA reveal that there is a strand of wolf DNA appearing in more and more of the coyotes – it looks like the wolves have decided on a more subtle repopulation strategy!
It was about noon when we left the Wild Center and there was another three hours in front of us before we were to reach Watertown. We made good progress and for the last 45 minutes we travelled alongside areas of land fenced off and with US Army signs forbidding entry. We found out later that this area is Fort Drum and Watertown is a very military town.
We arrived at the Best Western Carriage House on a busy street in Watertown but we felt already that Watertown was struggling and in the grip of the economic situation. The hotel had a high proportion of Army personnel and army families as guests, both men and women were in camouflage uniforms and there were at least three dog handlers with their dogs. Having checked in and been assigned to one of the better rooms on our travels we took a walk and our impression of the town did not improve. We retreated to the hotel and the rain arrived again to further dampen our spirits.
We felt quite lucky that we had opted for the Asian Buffet the previous evening rather than the Mexican Restaurant close to the hotel in Saranac Lake because the hotel had a Mexican Restaurant and nothing outside had tempted us.
That evening we enjoyed the Mexican meal and a very welcome Mexican beer. The military presence was very notable in both the bar and dinning area and as the diners finished their meals nearly all of them settled their bills individually and mainly courtesy of Uncle Sam, some of the diners split the food from the drink and I’m guessing had to pay for the drink themselves.
Although it was a high standard room and the members of staff were all very pleasant, the stay was spoiled for Julia by being disturbed by traffic up and down the corridor outside the room. In the king size bed I remained unaware of Julia’s problems – I slept well.