Drink, Sleep and meet Randy

8/6/05 New York, NY to Cooperstown, NY

This morning we slept in, since our most tentatively scheduled interview fell through. We totally needed the rest, since we’d been taking full advantage of the New York City nightlife, which tricks you into thinking that it is not actually that late, even though it’s 5am and only about six hours away from the next interview.

We grabbed some pizza from the corner store and tripped just up the road to the obviously superior portal out of the city, the George Washington Bridge. We’ve learned our lesson about the traffic to the Holland tunnel, and won’t be taking that again. The no-stress Saturday drive up to Cooperstown we had anticipated proved mostly true, minus the Land-Rovers-on-vacation that seemed to be crowding Interstate 87. I wondered how many stockbrokers sat anxiously at their steering wheels, convincing themselves against reason that they were going on a damn vacation, and that they were going to HAVE A DAMN GOOD TIME. Joke’s on them though. I’ve got a hatchback civic strapped to my ass that some folks refer to as the roller-skate. I know exactly where I stand, and it ain’t on Wall Street.

The rural drive through the Catskill Mountains is one of most picturesque I have ever taken, and since the sun was shining, everything looked even more like a Winslow Homer painting, complete with black and white spotted cows. The 228 mile drive takes between four and five hours, putting us into Ommegang Brewery at about 6pm. Although we’d missed our appointment (by several hours) and Brewmaster Randy Thiel had to leave for dinner, he graciously gave us squatter’s rights, offering to let us camp for the night on the property. We were thrilled, since we weren’t sure when we were going to have the opportunity to camp again, and eagerly accepted the accommodations as well as the two bottles of delicious beer he said would keep us warm.

We spent the rest of the night regrouping (we hadn’t put ice in our cooler since the beginning of the week, so we desperately needed to throw out the Havarti in there and clean off the beer bottles it had oozed onto) and talking around the campfire Mike built.