We started off the morning with a couple of games of, "Speedy Eddy" a game about snails racing through a garden. There are carrots that can bonk you, causing you to lose a turn, tempting lettuce patches that delay you until you roll doubles, windstorms that separate your player from their shell (which slows you down a lot, until you get them back together), secret tunnels to shoot you forward and back, and lucky clover patches that allow you to roll again...all in all a great game, just right for little guys and sleepy dads...until your 5-year-old alters the rules for Halloween, and then it's hard to keep everything straight before coffee...the board, pieces, and dice are all made from wood...old school...
Once we got our morning straightened out, and decided on a plan of action (other than hanging out by the wood stove downstairs), we made a beeline for "Woods" (actually known as "The Long Lake Diner") for an early lunch...
Ben was incredibly excited about "FREE DESSERT!!!", which we didn't understand until he pointed out the lollipops on the way out...
Our next stop was the Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake, which like every museum worth its salt, has a really big chair out front for kids to climb on in the rain...
The ADK Museum is a great museum focusing on the history of our region that Ben is finally old enough to enjoy and understand...they have a great collection of boats, powered and paddled, including this super-cool boat with a canopied "chamber"...
The exhibit on logging, which is an incredibly important part of Adirondack History, is phenomenal, and included some fun new stuff to get kids involved in learning about how the woods were harvested...
This portion of the logging exhibit, focusing on the logging camps, is a favorite of mine because the stove pictured here was donated from the (Pretty) "Great Camp" that I lived in during the summers of my childhood...this stove lived in the huge old kitchen of the main building of our camp, and in my lifetime was only used to heat the cavernous space on cold mornings, not to cook our meals; although it was used in that capacity during my father's childhood...
The ADK museum used to have signage saying that the stove came from a logging camp, but they have now changed it to say that a stove like this one could have been at a logging camp...I had a talk one day with a docent about the stove's history and design (they've removed/painted over some of the chromed detail work on the stove's front, it was/is too fancy for a logging camp stove)...I don't know if the signage was changed as a result of my harassing the docent, but I like to think so...
The ADK Museum has recently added a bunch of kid-friendly "Touch Me" manipulatives that go along with their exhibits that can help kids better understand the things that they are seeing...Ben loved playing with these farm implements, especially the butter-churn and this bucket-yoke...
Gail and Ben loved the old and handmade toys...Ben couldn't believe that someone had made all of those tiny and intricate pieces by hand, but loved looking at them and trying to guess what some of the more esoteric things were...
We had a great, if wet, view of Blue Mountain Lake from the observation deck down by the "Woods and Waters" exhibit (maybe my favorite in the whole museum)...
Ben was entranced by the Adirondack Hermit's cabin...Noah John Rondeau lived most of his life alone and out in the woods as a squatter/hermit in various places in the deep wilderness areas of the Adirondacks, and after he died, his cabin was moved to the Museum from a spot about 25 miles away...
You can see his bed in the far end of the cabin, it was rough living and the first thing that Ben remarked on was the low ceiling and door (Ben could walk in, but any taller, and you would have to stoop), I assume that was to make it more heat-efficient)...
In this picture, you can see the woodstove that he used for heat ing and cooking...across the cabin, on the other side of the door opening, there was a table/cutting surface and a couple of plates and cups and some silverware...
This finial picture of the cabin shows a statue of Noah John Rondeau that a local woodcarver make that is roughly life-sized (which gives you an idea about the size of the cabin, especially since he was a pretty tiny guy)...
In the background you can see a bunch of trees arranged tee-pee style, which I learned (when I read a biography of Rondeau a few years ago) was his clever innovation for firewood...he would cut down trees in the Spring, and then limb them and notch them before stacking them this way to dry for the winter...by notching the trees at stove length-ed intervals with his ax, he could easily break them in the winter and have dried wood in the proper length without having to stack cords and cords of wood under a roof he would have had to build for himself...
A great visit to a great museum!!!
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