Days 91 & 92: Cooperstown, NY

From Middleville, NY we drove to Cooperstown, NY.  The first stop was the New York Historical Association Library in Cooperstown, where I did some research on my Wiggins line, but after a couple of hours of looking I came away empty handed.  From there we proceeded over to the home of Travis Hodgdon and his wife Gretchen and their boys Cooper (who was named thus before they had any thought of living in Cooperstown) and Teddy.  This is the one stop that we have most been looking forward for the past ten and a half months of traveling.

I first met Travis on the 21st of June 1985, somewhere between Jackson Hole, WY and Signal Mountain Campground, where we camped that night.  My journal says that he had been traveling with two unnamed couples whom I had also been riding with in the preceding weeks: that was probably Doug and Jenny Sensenig (neither they nor he recalls that clearly) and Kevin Pennock and Sylvie Grondin (he definitely recalls the latter couple).

25 June 1985.

Ditto. 

Travis and my bike, a few days earlier.

We rode through Yellowstone National Park together for four more days, parting company on the afternoon of 25 June 1985.  That particular day started out rather miserable, as it was 35 degrees out and had rained all night long at Tower Fall Campground.  I started out moaning and groaning about the weather, until it dawned on me that cold rain at the campground would mean it was snowing at Dunraven Pass, which we would have to cross to reach Canyon Village to the south.  I urged Travis into gear and we broke camp in less than an hour, hoping to ride through the snow in the middle of summer, with the thought that it would warm up later in the afternoon (the latter didn't happen - it stayed around 40 degrees most of the day).

I had a blast riding up the pass through the snow, but quickly got ahead of Travis.  I learned later that was in part because he had fallen in the snow (he had yelled for me to stop, but I didn't hear him).  So I arrived at the summit well in advance of him.  I was already cold when I got there, and I quickly started piling on every extra layer of clothing that I had with me.  That still wasn't enough, but I was determined to wait for Travis, so that we could have our picture taken together in the snow.  When he finally showed up, a Dutch family quickly obliged us.

It was then time to find some warmth, but you don't really generate any heat cycling down hill.  The road was also pretty slick, plus the snow and slush was clogging up my brakes, making it hard to control my descent.  I finally managed to come to a stop and discussed with Travis what to do about our predicament.  In my journal I wrote that I suggested we hitch a ride down the hill, though my memory is that it was Travis who saved the day with that vital common sense suggestion.  It seemed like the second vehicle coming down the pass stopped to help us out, which was a brand new Toyota pick up being driven by a couple of hikers.  I immediately picked up my bike by the fork and seat stay and literally threw it into the bed of the pickup, catching out of the corner of my eye the look of shock on the driver's face as it went sailing into the blemish-free pickup bed (oops!).  Travis was more thoughtful in loading his bike, and we were soon shivering our way down to Canyon Village.  Obviously, we could not thank our Good Samaritan friends enough, but we also needed to get warm in a hurry and glanced around for a place to do that.  The condensation on the laundromat windows indicated it would be the perfect place, so we went there and searched for any warm, empty dryers to help us get warmed up as quickly as possible.

We parted company a while later, after cooking a meal in the parking lot.  Travis needed to head due east, where he would soon be joining he Navy, while I was headed south and east to visit friends and family.

No sooner had we arrived at Travis' home in Cooperstown than they had gotten word that their son Teddy had fallen off a swing on the last day of school.  He got a nasty bang on the forehead, but seemed to be shrug it off like most kids eventually do.

We spent the day getting to know a bit more about his family and recounting our past cycling adventures.  Gretchen prepared an awesome dinner of barbecued chicken and all the fixin's, and the day ended up with several neighbor kids coming over for 'smores around a roaring campfire.

Gretchen and Travis Hodgdon.

Our second day there was a time to attend to some business.  We had several packages delivered to their house, including our new 100 watt solar panel.  We needed a place to safely store the panel while traveling, and that required making some minor modifications to how we store things, including finding a new location for our small folding table.  By sacrificing Alea's yoga mat, we were able to store the table attached to the rear passenger side barn door of the van.

Cooper and some of the neighborhood kids helped keep Lana entertained while we were making these modifications.  She had a blast, though at times was a bit overwhelmed by all the attention.  And she was a very stiff, sore puppy dog when she woke up in the morning.

Cooper demonstrates that there is LOTS of room in our teardrop camper!

Lana shows off her acrobatic form to Cooper.

We also needed to wire the new solar panel with a 12v cigarette lighter connection, so that it could be plugged into the camper's built-in solar controller.  What I had hoped would be a half hour project turned into a bit of an ordeal that lasted a few hours.  Once the wiring was done, it should have been a simple matter to plug it in, with the 12v plug's green LED lighting up to show us that it was charging.  That didn't happen, so we assumed I had reversed the polarity of the camper's inlet plug.  That meant I needed to empty out our deep storage bin and dig out the 80 pound battery in order to access the back of our solar inlet: a process I repeated a half a dozen times, trying trying several things to see if that light would come on.  In the end I returned things to the original configuration, and then looked at the solar controller itself, which had a glowing light that indicated that it was charging.  So the problem was that the green LED on the 12v plug didn't work, and I had wasted a lot of time figuring that out.

One other item that we took care of was replacing our rusted and dented baby moon hubcabs.  That involved painting the back of the new hubcaps with primer (to help prevent them rusting from the inside) and spraying them with three coats of wax on the outside.  Hopefully they will last more than the 4 years that we got out of the first set.

The new hub cap showing the reflections of Teddy and Cooper Hodgdon, and the old, rusted hub cap.

We were treated to lunch at the nearby Ommegang Brewery, which we enjoyed immensely.  It had been acquired by a Belgian company, and the menu featured a food that it seemed I had consumed almost daily when I had lived in Belgium in the late 1960s: frites (French fries, which the "Belgiques" preferred with a very thick, creamy mayonnaise).  These thick-cut frites weren't as soft as those that I remember from 50 years ago (probably because they were cooked in lard back then), but they were better than any that I have had in this country.  So we thoroughly enjoyed our lunch there, as well as the interesting buildings and picturesque, pastoral setting.

Ommegang Brewery.

In the evening Gretchen treated us to pulled-pork sandwiches and a tomato-mushroom-basil salad, which was followed by another campfire out by Travis' Green Monster scoreboard.  He had completed it a few years back, and it was best viewed from a section of three Fenway park seats that included one painted red to represent where Ted Williams hit a 502-foot long home run on 9 June 1946.  He also has a sign that says "502" planted in the field across the street, though the actual distance is somewhat less because there wasn't enough room.

The Green Monster.