Monday September 17, 2012

Malone, NY to Tupper Lake NY  97Km 750m vertical climb 

First on the to do list was a visit to a local store for phone cards and a memory card for TimB’s (wife’s) camera.  Despite being the tour IT expert he managed to make the card unrecognisable for the Notepad AND the camera. The weather was excellent and the clear sky forecast meant that I had to cream up a bright red face from the first stage. The stage started off tough and stayed that way. The first 15km were uphill and thereafter each decline was followed by a hill a bit higher than the last one. There were no opportunities to pull in for a tea break so we targeted a place call Paul Smith’s that was signposted about 35 miles away. It turned out that Paul Smith’s is a college and we stood outside the entrance with no apparent place to go for lunch. TimB stopped a motorist leaving the college and asked if there was a restaurant in the area and he was told that there was one a few miles towards Lake Placid. That would have meant a big detour that we did not want to do so we decided to try the college on the grounds that they must have a restaurant of some sort and we could only be rejected on the grounds of ineligibility. We followed road signs through the grounds and parked the bikes outside the St.Regis Café where many students were entering the building. Well, we went in and nobody batted an eyelid so our confidence rose and as the students queued to turn left we turned right into the St. Regis café. That is where we stopped for a second because the cloth covered tables, uniformed waitresses and panorama windows overlooking the terrace and Lower St. Regis Lake made us both think we would at least be turned away if not arrested. Far from it, an extremely attractive sophomore student took us to a table and gave us her utmost attention for the next hour. We had smoked pork and red bean soup, crayfish and shrimp pie and finished off with banana slices in a hot caramel sauce on a bed of vanilla ice cream all for ten dollars. Yep 10$!! TimB busied himself with his camera to take a picture of our waitress while I tried to figure how to tell him we should forget the tour and check into the college for a month. In the end he pointed out that his wife was only about 2 hours away by car so it was much safer to carry on the tour. Duly fortified were continued on to Tupper Lake where we found a lakeside motel and a restaurant (with the all important liquor licence) just down the road. Unfortunately, several bottles of 5.4% Blue Moon beer rendered us both unable to write the blog afterwards, hence the delay.