Days 53 - 55

Day 53
October 8, 2010

Travel Day – Ashland, NH to Cooperstown, NY
Today was a travel day. We left the campground in Ashland at 6:45 AM, as we have a long distance to go, and we wanted to stop enroute in the Albany, NY area to do some family research. We also traveled on our own today. It was still dark when we left, but after stopping for fuel, the sun came out and not a cloud to be seen. As we crossed the mountains in Vermont, there were some very ominus clouds gathering, but after a few miles they disappeared. When we got to Troy, NY, we pulled into the back of the Wal-Mart parking lot and disconnected our car. We left the motor home there while we did our family research. We drove north to the small town of Greenwich, NY to find the Bottskill Baptist Church Cemetery. We had a bad address, but saw a bunch of Churches, so we went by them all, and the last one was what we were looking for. Unfortunately, no one was at the Church, so we just started looking at headstones. Most of them were very overgrown with grass, so we had to do some weeding to read most of them. After cleaning about 60 headstones, we found the 3 we wanted. We took pictures and identified their locations with GPS for future reference. We then headed for Albany, NY. Our drive took us along the Hudson River. We stopped for lunch in Mechanicsville, NY. The Albany Rural Cemetery is a very old and huge cemetery. We found the office, and a very helpful gentleman checked their files and was able to provide precise directions to the graves we were looking for. We actually found eight graves of ancestors. Of course, we had to do more weeding so we could read them. We still had one more cemetery to find, but it was almost 3 PM, and we still had to drive back to Troy to pick up the motor home and drive another 70 miles to get to our campground. We wanted to get there before dark. It’s a good thing we did leave, as the traffic back through Albany was terrible and a traffic accident on the freeway didn’t help. We arrived at the campground about 6:15 PM, and the light was fading fast. Hopefully, we will have some free time to drive back to Nassau, NY before we leave this area on Monday.

Day 54
October 9, 2010

Cooperstown, NY
Today we woke to clear sunny skies, but it was cold, 36 deg. We were given tickets foe three different venues that we could visit at our leisure over the two days we will be in Cooperstown. Corinne was getting one of her Migrain headaches, so we decided to wait a while to see if it would go away. We had planned to visit another cemetery in Canajoharie, NY to look for graves of more ancestors, so I figured this was a good time for me to do that and Corinne stayed in camp. The drive to Canajoharie was about 50 miles round trip. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any luck finding the graves I was looking for. Quite a lot of the old head stones were made of sandstone and were badly eroded and unreadable. Also, there was no one there that I could ask for help, and no contact information was available. After I returned to camp, Corinne was feeling better, but we decided to for go any of the activities today. Later in the afternoon, we went to the social hour where we made grilled cheese sandwiches, and some desserts over a campfire. When it got dark, we all retired to our rigs.

Day 55
October 10, 2010
Cooperstown, NY

Today we woke to another clear but cold morning. That makes three days in a row without rain. First thing this morning, we had our travel meeting for tomorrows travel to Corning And Bath, NY. Mid morning we headed into town to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. We did not spend much time there as we are not baseball fans. Our next stop was the Farmer’s Museum. They had a lot of old 1800’s farm buildings and equipment to go through. We got to see a demonstration of an old threshing machine. There were docents in period costume in each building to explain what they were doing or showing. We ate lunch at the museum. After the museum, we drove around town a little then headed back to camp. We had our usual social time at 4:30.