Road trip!

Like I was saying yesterday, Yummy and I went to visit an old roommate up in Ithica, NY. He's going to Cornell. He just got his PhD in BioNeural Programming or words to that effect. He has crashed on my couch several times and was returning the favor.

Most of the area is shale. Shale erodes fairly easily. So the area is lousy with ravines and waterfalls. There's a path from Mark's neighborhood to the campus that runs along a stream with several levels of small falls. You just don't want to go in winter when everything is icy.
The river shown above is home to some impressively large crawdads.
This is Taughannock Falls not too far north of town. You may be able to make out a tiny bridge down below that allows people to walk to the foot of the falls. The falls are a bit higher than Niagara Falls.
We went swimming here. It's on the edge of town. There's an abandoned factory at the top of that cliff that used to use the river for power. Their dam provides a nice straight fall at the top. It's followed by several levels of natural, jagged, and shallow slate formations. The sun warms the slate and the water runs over the slate so we had a ... warm wouldn't be the right term ... a not very cold pool to swim in.
If you look at a map of New York state it looks like something with really big talons drug them across the state. They call these the finger lakes. If you start driving up the shore of one of these lakes you'll hit one winery after another. At these wineries you pony up $2 and you can sample some of their wines. We hit two wineries and a hard cidery (sp!). At one we got to choose 5 from a list of 8, the next we tried all 7 ciders, the third lets you pick all you want from among 16, and for an extra dollar you can try something from the blueberry wine list. Since we knew what we were getting we got 8 different bottles to bring home. One just to serve poured over vanilla ice cream. We might order some of the stuff that goes with fudge down the line.
I also took the opportunity to teach Yummy about how to mess with the depth of field on your camera. After a few tries she got what you see below.

All pictures can be enlarged by click on them.