The Finger Lakes area

Driving through rain showers on the way to our next campground outside Ithaca, New York, we began noticing big road signs - the kind that ordinarily warn you about a bridge out or a detour ahead - telling us "PHISH CONCERT CANCELLED".  A huge rock festival had been scheduled for Watkins Glen, just down the road from where we were scheduled to camp, but torrential rains washed it out.  For weeks now TV news has been telling us about severe flooding in several of the northeastern states.

And we have indeed seen a lot of rain over the past few months.  In fact, all up and down the East Coast, the pastures and lawns and trees have been incredibly green and beautiful, a result of the fact that unlike on the West Coast, which has a wet season and a dry season, it rains on the eastern states all year round.  Unfortunately, the rain has also allowed the mosquito population to flourish, so we're itching and scratching.

Our campground was in the Finger Lakes wine region of New York state.  We drove to a well-reviewed vintner, Catharine Valley Winery, for a tasting.  The winery is in a pretty setting on the shores of Seneca Lake (one of the fingers).  Those are vines in the background.

For $5, we sampled six wines.  (Napa Valley has a slightly different pricing structure.)  The two reds - Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc - were truly undrinkable.  The whites were pretty good, especially the Riesling and the Late Harvest Gewurztraminer.

Ithaca is home to two institutions of higher learning, Cornell University and Ithaca College.  Cornell is one of the famous Ivy League schools   We visited its campus, which was welcoming the return of its students from summer break.  To be honest, most of the architecture was unimpressive, and the surrounding housing looked a bit seedy.

The town of Ithaca has a very nice pedestrian mall downtown.  Nancy and I had a fine lunch at an outdoor restaurant there.  We passed a barbershop, and Nancy forced a haircut on me.

Ithaca's downtown has a summer concert series, and one of the strangest groups I've ever witnessed was playing while we were visiting.  It was a Dixieland jazz band with an opera singer.  Don't see that combination very often.