Karen's Journey

Monday, July 30, 2012 Morning from our condo's upper deck. Not a bad way to start a day. Our first full day starts out late with all of us sleeping in after a long night watching the Olympics women's gymnastics qualifiers on TV. I generally have a no-TV-on-vacation rule, but that has to go out the window when the Olympics are happening. I'm a confirmed Olympics junkie. It's a nice day, but on the warm side for hiking, and we're not prepared -- with two kids needing hiking socks and having left our water bottles at home. It just seems like it will be too stressful to try to pull everything together in time. So we decide to get to the top the easy way -- a gondola ride to the summit of Little Whiteface. It's interesting vacationing in this former Olympics town when the Olympics are taking place across the pond in London. I think that the quiet wilderness that was the Adirondacks probably started turning into a vacation mecca as a result of the 198

Day 1: July 29, 2012 T wakes up earlier than usual, walks up to me and says "Happy Lake Placit Day!" He's so excited to be going to the mountains. I find a document that has the name printed out and show him the 'd' at the end of the word 'Placid.' We've been trying to emphasize that the word ends in a 'd' but he doesn't get it until he sees it. From then on, he says "Lake Placid." For some reason I think it's cute that he was calling it "Placit." We are so far behind on getting ready that we don't leave until 1:30, meaning that instead of eating lunch at any of the many Mom and Pop diners in the mountains, we have to settle for Burger King on the boulevard. Blech.  Ideally we'd get to Lake "Placit" at 3:00, giving us time to hit the grocery store so that our food shopping would be done for the week, giving us more time to do the fun stuff that there is to do here. Even if that's just sittin