8/1 to 8/3 - Finger Lakes to Gansevoort, NY

Saturday we again went looking for a circuit breaker while fitting in a few more interesting things.  After finally finding the circuit breaker and installing it with no change in the behavior of the RV, it finally occurred to someone that the hydraulic fluid should be checked.  Turns out the top had popped off the fluid container, possibly as a result of traveling over horribly rough roads, and a goodly amount of fluid had either been used, evaporated or bounced out.  Once it was replaced everything worked fine.  Go figure.  This apparently didn’t occur to the tech at Lippert either (manufacturer of the hydraulic system) because he never mentioned it during the phone call.

Going to Bath to look for the circuit breaker fit right in with another mission in the area.  There’s a VA Medical Center there and on its grounds is the Bath National Cemetery.  Jim’s great-great-grandfather Abraham (Abram) Race is buried there as a result of his Civil War service.  He was in the 1^st NY Dragoons, a cavalry regiment.  The older markers have no dates on them which makes sense because it would have been terribly difficult to get everyone’s dates of death on their markers when there were so many Civil War casualties and permanent markers were probably made long after the burials.  The cemetery is huge and veterans are still being buried there.

Abram (Abraham) V. Race, Co. K, 1st N.Y. Dragoons - 1838-1916

The grounds and buildings are beautiful and very well maintained.  The buildings date from 1878 when the facility was built as housing for Civil War veterans.  They spent the next 50 years as veterans’ housing until the Veterans Administration took over in 1930.  The facility subsequently became the VA Medical Center that serves southern NY and northern Pennsylvania.

The biggest building on the site is the VA Hospital.  It looks like the building is too old to be retrofitted with air conditioning because many of the windows have AC units.  Must be hard to air condition an entire hospital that way.

After seeing the cemetery we went up to Hammondsport for lunch and winery hunting.  Hammondsport is at the south end of Keuka Lake, the next lake to the east from Canandaigua.  

Hammondsport is a picturesque little town right on the lake.  Looked like it would be fun to wander around in but Jim’s feet aren’t up to wandering so we just drove through it.

 Maloney’s Pub in Hammondsport, squeeze into a triangular corner.

Bully Hill VIneyards, the wonderful winery we visited on Saturday.  This place has fantastic landscaping as well as outstanding wine.  There are so many wineries in the area it was hard to choose which one to visit, so this one was the winner in honor of Melee, our Bully grand-dog.

Keuka Lake is barely visible over the main buildings of Bully Hill Winery.  Their tour was very interesting.  We were amazed at how much product is made by so few people.  There are only ten production workers who actually make the wine and only three big pieces of equipment.  Lots of other employees do a variety of jobs including the very busy tasting rooms, wine sales room, gift shop and restaurant.  The winery makes over 300,000 gallons a year.

View of Keuka Lake from up high on the hilltop where Bully Hill and several other wineries are located.  Our tour guide said the Finger Lakes make such a good growing area for grapes because the cold fog coming off the lakes in the spring delays their growth for a few weeks so they’ll miss any late frosts, and warm air in the fall gives them an extra couple of weeks of growing time.  The open fields across the lakes are vineyards belonging to independent growers who sell their grapes to Bully Hill which can’t grow enough to meet its requirements.

Sunday we had to go back to Bath (15 miles away) to do laundry since our campground’s laundry facilities consisted of one washer and dryer.  The laundromat turned out to be the nicest one we’ve used in all our travels…..new, clean, relatively quiet, reasonably priced and….a first….free wifi.  Afterwards we went back to Hammondsport to another winery which couldn’t hold a candle to Bully Hill.  We appreciated their free tastings (everyone else charges) but didn’t think enough of their wine to buy any.  Thanks to the GPS we found our way home via little back roads that cut miles off going back the way we’d come.

Today we drove 285 miles east to Gansevoort, a little town just north of Saratoga Springs.  Tomorrow we’re going to spend the day at the Saratoga National Battlefield Park which is the reason for our being here.