Upstate New York Roadtrip
This trip my friend Alex and I took is a perfect example of making memories over pictures. It was winter break of my sophomore year and we knew that we wanted to go to a waterfall in upstate New York called Taughannock Falls. It was 5 hours away and there wasn't a chance my mom was going to let me go since I had just gotten my license, so I told her I was going to take pictures in Baltimore all day then spend the night at Alex's. Somehow that worked and then we were on our way.
Once we were about an hour away from the waterfall, we took a little pit stop to take some pictures by this lake somewhere upstate.
A little bit later we made it to Taughannock Falls State Park. It was around 20 degrees with strong winds, and there I was with khakis, a hoodie, and a rain jacket. I cannot emphasize how cold I was that day. Anyways, we did the quick hike up to the waterfall, took some photos and videos, and just enjoyed being out there.
After we got back to the car, we blasted the heat and just sat there defrosting ourselves. We weren't really sure what to do, so we decided that it would be a good idea to drive even more north to Lake Ontario in December. Once we got to the lake, it was snowing like crazy and the sun had already set. I don't even remember where we parked since everything was covered in snow, but we trekked about a half mile in six inches of snow. It was getting dark and we didn't even know where we were going but we were going.
Once we got to the lake, we started climbing these weird dirt mounds and ending up taking a couple photos, but that was about it since our hands were frozen. After about five minutes, it got really dark so we started heading back. For some reason I remember thinking someone was following us but I think I was just cold. We somehow made it back to the car, defrosted for ten minutes, then started driving back south.
We drove for probably 20 minutes before this huge snowstorm hit us. I guess we didn't really remember to check the weather, but I just remember driving while inches of snow were piling up every couple minutes. It was snowing so hard I couldn't see the road and better yet, the snow was reflecting all the light from my headlights so I was basically driving blind. We figured that it wasn't going to be safe to drive, so we ended up pulling into a shopping mall parking lot and posted up there for the night.
Let's get this straight, sleeping in your car in upstate New York during the winter is not fun. Now that I'm looking back, it's pretty funny, but I just remember turning the car on for a couple minutes to blast the heat five or six times that night. Alex still claims that he wasn't that cold that night but I think he's just being a tough guy. Anyways, I started driving back home and we ended up making a little detour to see some of the mountains in Pennsylvania as the sun was rising. We were driving up this one road and boom, there was like six or seven mountain goats just chilling in the road. I obviously stopped, but they started surrounding my car. We never ended up getting out of the car because we weren't sure how they'd react, but we stopped the car and took a lot of pictures. Two of the goats were super friendly. We named the black and white one Billy, and the all white on Gerald. We had some intimate goat talks with them, fed them some Cheez-Its, then left them to be. It was an experience I'm glad I was able to have and a great ending to the trip.
