Dang RV

I got a hankering to see the Adirondack Mountains, Lake George, and Lake Champlain so up to the northern tip of New York I went. Again, despite calling twice to verify my aircard would work near Lake George, it didn’t work though there is a tiny signal there in some spots. Calls to all the nearby campgrounds that purported to have wifi yielded more “yes we have it if you sit by our office” nonsense. The C2C campground, Adirondack Adventure Resort,  was very very nice with wonderful helpful staff but with no Internet I had to leave. Bummer. I was looking forward to seeing Lake George and the Great Escape Six Flags amusement park. It was not to be.

Rather than abandon that leg of the trip, I made some more calls farther north until I located Ausable River Campsites, a Passport America park in Keeseville, very close to Ausable Chasm, Lake Champlain, and Lake Placid. Woohoo! Solid gold strike! While they do have wifi throughout the park, after half an hour on it it turns to crap every time. I swear the 3rd party providers of it are throttling it to discourage any long use. Happily, my Sprint aircard worked there so I was in business. The park has a wonderful heated pool and lots of planned activities. I managed to get on the hayride and grab some ice cream at the social.

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While I am not a rabid baseball fan, I do very much like baseball and wanted to get 3 baseball fantasies satisfied on this trip. I accomplished the first already when I had a catch on the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa. The next was to see The National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. To be in the presence of The Great Bambino (Babe Ruth) and The Ironman (Lou Gehrig) would be awesome. I was also hoping the women in baseball would be there. I was not disappointed.

It has not been an easy part of my trip. I had hoped to stay at a Passport America campground just south of Cooperstown. After driving through buckets of rain, hail, and lightening to get there, I discovered that there is no aircard signal anywhere in the area. None. Zip. Zero. The park I had reservations at did have wifi but you have to sit outside their office to use it which is not terribly comfortable or useful for 9 hours a night while working. They have a repeater but it isn’t currently working. I stayed one night in a soft wet grassy area then had to seek out other arrangements. It’s a good thing I have a 4×4 truck to get out of there. Getting out of the wet grass and going up the steep dirt driveway back out to the road wasn’t easy.

I found another park with wifi all through it within a couple miles of Cooperstown and still affordable. Unfortunately, it also had no aircard signal and their wifi had gone down during the storm but they had not noticed until I pointed it out. After several hours of trying to get it back online with the installer out of the country and his on-call buddies not answering their phones, I had to move on again.

I finally ended up in Herkimer, NY in the Herkimer Diamond Mine Resort KOA. It is more expensive than the others but it does have full working wifi with plenty of repeaters as KOAs often do. It is right across the street from a diamond mine where you can try your hand at mining for a unique experience and it is next to a large creek where tubing is quite popular. I took advantage of their ice cream socials while I was there and wasn’t going to miss out on free s’mores at the campfire either. The staff were friendly and two nice workampers invited me over to their campfire as well. I played a bit of bingo too.

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