Kingston, Ontario (and the way there)

Good evening, fellow motion junkies. Things have been a little grim around here recently, kinetic energy-wise. If it wasn't on the L train, I wasn't going there. It's too cold and snowy to bike. A man starts to get ideas in his head. A few weeks ago I stole a car (from my mother) and drove it to Canada for a total of one day.

The first stop on this trip was Oswego, New York, part of a small obsession with the history of my cagey family that I've been cultivating lately. Armed only with this sixty-year-old advertisement

I set out in search of my great-grandfather's metal shop, and found it. The Adams Hotel had undergone several reincarnations (the Joy Bar, the Smith Hotel and Tavern), and was now suffering out its last couple decades as a beat-up flophouse. Windows were broken, but some lights were on upstairs, and a sign on the door gave a phone number you could call to get a room, probably fenced in with chicken wire.

It had seen better days. You can tell where the turret used to be. If you make your way through the snowy parking lot, you can even see where the workshop was:

Not much to look at lately, but probably well-preserved. Okay, on we go, because I'm learning that East 3rd Street is kind of a bum hangout after dark.

Up and through Watertown, NY, which hasn't been dug out since 19 inches of snow fell. I had the address of a diner, and drove around for an hour asking unhelpful old men where it was. "You know where the auto parts store is?" -- "No, I'm not from here." -- "Okay, well, go to where Jim Franklin used to live, then turn left, then get in the middle lane, then drive eighteen blocks, then turn right on Oak Street, and watch out, there's no sign." When I found the diner, it was boarded up. I dejectedly skidded my way back to McDonalds, read USA Today, regrouped and crossed the border.

Kingston is worth it, fortunately. They have a nice Motel 6, where I set up camp, but I was wishing I'd stayed across the street

-- oh well, next time. Kingston also has more of that conventional Ontario gorgeousness:

You can skate in front of City Hall. The whole city is about three miles wide, and afterward the countryside goes on forever. It gets windy but it's gorgeous. In December the town basically breathes and bleeds snow. You just stumble from place to place through storms. My great-great-grandmother supposedly died after too many hours walking on unshoveled Kingston sidewalks. I'd be okay with walking around Kingston as an old man until my feet gave out, honestly. What a great town.

No big message here. "Kingston has good hamburgers?" "Cross the border more?" I drove almost 800 miles in one weekend, Modest Mouse style? I dunno. I need to keep moving. I'll leave you with this ancient barn on Perth Road, halfway to where guard dogs and a snowy dirt road prevented me from reaching my great-great-great-grandfather's old farm. Happy trails, y'all.

The Mansion District, Albany

A bit of a change of pace here, although I haven't updated in so long you've probably forgotten what the pace was like to begin with. But in this case I don't know the history and can't be bothered to even make it up, so let's just talk appearances.

When you're upstate for awhile, you start jonesing for NYC, I find. After a certain number of quaint farm towns and general stores and state troopers, etc., etc., you really wish you could just look at some tenements for a few minutes. The next best thing, as it turns out, is to cut through Albany.

I never really knew a lot about Albany, although being from Springfield it wasn't exactly a long hop. But, I mean, why would you go? Even when I tell people about it now, they don't understand what I was doing there. What I was doing was just picking random freeway exits. If you happen to take Route 20 and pull over when you're driving up a giant hill, you'll hit the Mansion, an old townhouse neighborhood just across the highway from downtown.

Let's be frank: the Mansion is a slum. At 2 PM people are drinking out in the street, and half of the [beautiful] row houses are boarded up and being left to rot. Still, it's beautiful, and familiar-looking enough to tug on even the most diehard downstater's heartstrings. A Brooklynite like me familiar with the traditional course of gentrification might be tempted to drop three months' rent and buy a house [note, remove this slight exaggeration before publishing], fix it up, see where it takes them. Of course, then you're stuck living in Albany.

So act now! You too can have your own little piece of the 1970s! When you're bored, you can go to Empire State Plaza, which is one of the most underrated architectural disasters in America. Sure, it's a flat ugly Modernist hellhole, but hey... there's a reflecting pool! And the State House sure is purdy. At the very least, you should visit.

Richfield Springs, New York

Several months ago, I drove to Toronto on a whim. Just hopped in the car and did it, without the convenient excuse of a blog to make such a thing acceptable. I didn't have much of a purpose in mind; I just wanted to be on the road for awhile. The weather was nice and I had a couple days when nobody really needed me to be at work.

From Albany, I drove west on Route 20 for a few hundred miles, rather than taking the Thruway. The Thruway always inspires me to rage, and is full of police officers besides. Route 20, on the other hand, is one of the oldest roads across the state, and looks it; it's littered with abandoned shacks, beautiful old houses, and decaying street signs and towns.

Upstate New York used to be America's heartland. The Erie Canal was one of the first major routes inland in America, and the previously unnavigable route that it opened up caused a massive boom of settlement from New York City to Rochester. Settlers poured into the upstate region from Ireland, Germany, and the East Coast. My own family came to Fulton this way, driven by promises of industry.

The region is now agglomerated into the Rust Belt, and the old canal is mostly decommissioned; pieces of it line the sides of Route 12 and the thruway, and you can walk in abandoned canal locks, now facing dilapidated trailers and ranch houses. But Richfield Springs is an oasis of former prosperity. Every house looks like Edward Hopper painted it, and the four block stretch of the main drag is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful places where you could set foot in America. An ambitious town built in ambitious times, it's one of the high points of Upstate's Victorian-era splendor.

Get there: From Albany, drive west on Route 20 for 68 miles.