Well, last month I drove two lakes over… past Hammondsport on Keuka Lake, through Watkins Glen on Seneca Lake… and made a trip to Ithaca, on Cayuga Lake.
*It’s always a good drive from Bath, through some of the finest countryside in the central Finger Lakes, and through hamlets such as Tyrone, Bennettsburg, Mecklenburg, and Burdett, past farms and vineyards and churches and cemeteries, between the “Little Lakes” and through plenty of forest.
*Everybody in my family likes to visit Ithaca, but it also makes a good place for me to go when I have to think things through alone. And overall, it’s just a good place to visit. We first did so back in 1995, when my parents sent us money and told us to go away for a few days before my wife’s (highly successful!) open-heart surgery. (This was also the first time we saw Watkins or Penn Yan, but that’s another story.
*In this space a few weeks ago we talked about my time in Sapsucker Woods, northeast of the city, and there are other very special places out on the fringe. It’s a nice level walk in to Taughannock Falls, with its straight drop even higher than Niagara’s. At Robert Treman State Park we once walked a beaver galumph down the terraces alongside another waterfall, then slip into the pool. And Museum of the Earth is definitely worth a visit.
*For me the beating heart of Ithaca is The Commons, the downtown pedestrian mall with its events, its eateries, its art galleries, and its wildly-varied shops. One World Market (formerly Ten Thousand Villages) has fair-trade crafts from around the globe. Alphabet Soup emphasizes imaginative toys and games. Outdoor Store has been purveying bikes, outdoor clothing, and other gear for over half a century. Titus Gallery carries watercolors, African art, and antiques from around the world.
*I myself never miss Autumn Leaves, that marvelous three-level used book store… OR Comics for Collectors, around the corner in Collegetown. Going to either of them always lifts my spirits.
*Moosewood Restaurant, just off the Commons proper, has been driving America’s interest in vegetarian cooking since 1973. Collegetown Bagels is always crowded, for very good reasons. Shortstop Deli opened up with a very simple mission statement: the best sub in Ithaca. It’s been open since 1978, so it seems to be meeting its mission. The State Diner started out as a manufactured designer eighty years ago, in 1936; having eaten there repeatedly myself, I can say that they are, in fact, doing something right.
*The Commons recently completed a multi-year renovation and is sort of sparkly right now, but will soon look lived-in again. A small section of the old trolley tracks is preserved, and an obelisk in the center of the Commons marks the start of the Sagan Planet Walk. This is a fun walk that ends up three-quarters of a mile away, at the Ithaca Sciencenter. The planets, the asteroids, and Pluto are spaced off proportionally to their actual distances, and represented in obelisks at their proportional sizes. If you really want to “go the distance,” the Planet Walk also includes our nearest star group, including Alpha Centauri, proportionally set in Hawaii.
*Get out from the Commons and the downtown area and you can find Ithaca Falls, plus other falls and gorges for which the city is famed. Cornell Plantation is a 175-acre arboretum and botanical garden, including lovely Beebe Lake.
*Of course we can’t talk about Ithaca without Ithaca College and Cornell University. Cornell is our state’s land-grant institution; its 1865 creation was a huge step in making college accessible to New Yorkers. A recent count showed 22,000 students at Cornell, plus three Nobel Prize winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, and five MacArthur “Genius” grant recipients. In all 41 Nobel Prizes have gone to people who were either faculty or students at Cornell. All of this guarantees that a trip to Ithaca will find a zest, and even a goofiness, that offers a lot of fun. I like it.