Lake Placid, Home of the Fourth
I mean, really, there can’t be a town that does it better. For starters, they have ski jumping on the Fourth of July, going back something like 75 years. That’s just so crazy as to be perfectly American. Why have a ski jumping competition in the heat of summer? Because we CAN. They used to do it with hay and ice, and now it’s high tech, but still . . .
Then, the beach at Mirror Lake. We had boiled in the sun, but you can never be so hot that Mirror Lake doesn’t feel like an ice cube. The girls were in for about 3 minutes. I put my toes in and retracted immediately. Found a shady spot and settled in there for an hour. De-sanded them, hiked up to a simple little restaurant we had been to last year, had a nice dinner, and then staked out a prime spot for the Fourth of July Parade Slash Candy-Hurl. A great parade with the local war hero, police, fire and ambulance companies, a couple of bagpipe brigades, a marching band from way over to Pulaski, and the only rollerblading accordionist I had ever seen. Most important, to the kids anyway, is that pretty much every unit in the parade is obliged to hurl ridiculous amounts of candy at the crowd (lake side of the street gets much more, we’ve learned that much). The kids all scramble around for stray Tootsie Rolls. I scored an Atomic Fire Ball, so I was a happy daddy. Pictures at Fotolog later on in the day {NOTE: well, maybe tomorrow. Fotolog seems to be unavailable}. Then, down to the lakeside park and bandshell for some speechifyin’ and the Lake Placid Sinfonietta, all the children get to march around the bandshell to some appropriate old Sousa wheeze, and then we stake out a spot on the hill to wait and wait and wait for the fireworks. Of course, there are LOTS of random pieces being shot off around the lake, and a smokebomb thrown into a restaurant caused a little bit of excitement on the street, but there was a bit of a wait. It was well-worth it — the show was great. ONLY disappointment of the trip is that the Aroma-Round no longer serves meals, just coffee and pastries, so our visions of truly perfect Belgian waffles were dashed the next morning. Ah, well . . .