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Rochester day trip
Thursday, August 27 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I was awoke fairly early where I'd slept on the couch in the great room after not having slept for all that many hours. I ate a little buttered toast and made myself a travel mug of tea with two teabags. And then I set out on my drive to Rochester to do today's landlording chores.
The Thruway is a tiresome way to drive there, but fortunately for me, Google offered more scenic options that wouldn't take much more time and would require driving fewer miles. I opted for one that took me on two lane roads through the southern Adirondacks all the way to Utica, where I'd be getting on the Thruway and continuing the rest of the way on that. Initially the most intriguing thing about this route was that it required me to take a right when I reached Route 309 at the end of Woodworth Lake Road. (For nearly all destinations, I make a left there.) The route ended up being much more beautiful than expected, and not just for the gorgeous scenes of marsh-bordered wetlands. As I drove across one highland between Salisbury Center and Middleville, I passed through a wind farm where the massive three-wing propellors serenely churned somehow in winds that, on the ground, didn't appear to so much as rustle the leaves in the trees.
In Utica, I was confused by the signage and had to backtrack to find my way to the Thruway, which had me loudly demanding why things could not be more obvious. But then the driving became so much easier that I was a little worried about how little sleep I'd had. I'm also a little skeptical of the Subaru Forester, since it is the closest vehicle we have to a beater. I'd hear noises that alarmed me and have to turn down the stereo to listen better. On one occasion when I did that, the abrasive rubbing sound I was hearing turned out to be a sample or audio effect in a contemporary pop song.
As I approached Rochester, I needed to do more interactive mapping (the kind I am reluctant to do while driving) to find the best Lowes home improvement store to stop at. So I pulled into the Seneca Travel Plaza and made use of their bathroom (saving me the need to piss in a peanut jar the way I usually do while driving). Then I thought I'd get an oat milk cappuccino at Dunkin, but just as I was finishing me order on the kiosk (a robot that has completely replaced human employees), the fire alarm went off and I had to abandon the order and continue on my way.
At the Lowes off I-390, I bought a 80 pound sack or mortar as well as various adhesives, including wood glue and a big tube of landscape adhesive. These were all things I figured I would need for my landlording tasks.
The tenant at the rental house on Alliance Street greeted me with a baby in her arms. We chatted a little, as we'd never actually met each other, and I could sort of tell that she wasn't exactly simpatico with me based on her reactions to things I was enthusiastic about, such as the UFO-themed wallpaper near the stairs. The tenant happened to bring up a terrible news story she'd just learned, that "they" are going to change the name of nearby Lake Ontario to Lake America. (I was familiar with this story; it was part of how Donald Trump was lashing out at Canada after failed trade talk negotiaions, though the tenant never mentioned the president.) "That's ridiculous," I said, adding that the lake had its name before the Canadian province, which was named after it. This exchange suggested to me that the tenant was a fairly low-information consumer of news even though she lives an upper-middle-class life.
The tenant then showed me the two main items I was there to deal with, including a drawer in the kitchen whose front face had pulled off and the concrete-block-based steps in the back that had loosened in one place and started disintegrating in others. The drawer was easily fixed with the application of some new tiny nails and wood glue, though the steps were more of a challenge. As I was exploring their issues with the tenant, I mentioned as an aside that I like to build stone walls recreationally, figuring it might resonate with her work as a yoga instructor, but her reaction, which was muted, seemed to suggest that she was telegraphing the thought, "why are you telling me this?" So I dropped it and went back to work. My solution was to re-seat the loose concrete paver atop its neighbors on a thick pad of construction adhesive in the back with some wedge stones in the front to keep it from rocking (something that draws on my wall-building knowledge!) and then, once I had some spare mixed-up mortar, I worked some of that into the crack in the front as well. As for the crumbling blocks, I picked away the loose material and then filled-in the voids with mortar. Mortar doesn't adhere very well, but I manage to get as good of a consistency as I could. Then I put wet cardboard against the vertical and horizontal faces I'd just resurfaced and temporarily secured it all with loose pavers from the garage.
After that was done, the only remaining issue was the basement humidifier. When I confirmed that it was not collecting any water and so must just be wasting power, I decided I needed to drive out to Lowes again to get a new replacement. By this point, the male half of the tenant couple was there (he's a software developer and he'd built an impressive custom shelving unit for his many monitors), and he asked if it would be possible to have a dehumidifier that drained itself through a hose. I said that was a reasonable request and would try to get such a device.
At Lowes, the biggest model sold in that store was a Hisense that cost nearly $300. It wasn't all that much more expensive than the smallest model, so I went with that. But I also wanted to confirm that I could attach a hose to it so nobody would have to empty out the water collection tank. Nowhere on the box did it say this was an option, so I googled it and learned that it would accept a drainage hose. But what was the connector I needed? The only way to find out was to take the bulky thing out of its packaging there in the store and poke around its insides. In doing this, I found that the connector was a standard male garden hose connector. This sent me off in search of a cheap garden hose as well as supplies to build a shelf (so the dehumidifier could be up on a wall and easily drain into a slop sink).
As I was installing the new dehumidifier, the male tenant was with me and, of course, came up with another thing for me to fix. The washing machine makes a clunking sound, and he wondered what could be done about that, though he admitted it might be "out of scope." We ran a partial load so I could hear the clunking for myself, but when I couldn't think of anything to be done about it, I agreed that it was out of scope. I then showed him what I'd done on the steps and he and I chatted a little about the house generally. Gretchen had convinced the tenants that we intend to move into that house some day in hopes that they would take good care of it, so he kept referring to that eventuality. He also seemed much more concerned about the grass than was necessary. (This was probably just mainstream Americanism, something I rarely have to deal with so intimately.)
Gretchen had wondered if I wanted to reach out to our Rochester friends to get together with them, perhaps to even stay the night, but of course I'd told her that I just wanted to get in and get out without the stress of having to engage in social graces on the various random timelines of other people. So once all that work was done, I got back on the interstate and started driving back towards the cabin.
I needed both gas and road beer, so not long before getting back down to the Thruway, I took an exit expecting to immediately emerge into an ugly cluttered intersection featuring gas stations and convenience stores, since that is generally the land use pattern at interstate exits in this country. But for some reason Rochester is different, and I ended up in a region of endless suburbs without much in the way of commercial businesses at all. I drove for miles southeastward (thinking I could return to the interstate elsewhere further on) before getting to my first gas station. But the gas there was $4.50/gallon, much higher than the prices I'd seen elsewhere (around $4/gallon). So all I did was buy a four pack of beer, Dragonfly Hazy IPA. (It was disappointing, tasting a little like battery acid, and it took me the entire rest of the drive to drink a single 16oz can.)
After driving for many miles and not finding any other gas stations (this seems impossible, right?) I got back on the Thruway. A little west of Syracuse, I stopped at the Port Byron Service Area where gas was actually less than $4/gallon. While there, I also got an Impossible Whopper with fries from a Burger King and an oat milk cappuccino from a Dunkin. I put my road beer away for the entire time I was consuming those.
Happily, Google sent me back to the cabin the same way I'd left it, meaning it had me exit the Thruway and drive on Routes 29 and 29A from Utica. In the late afternoon, there was a bank of dark clouds to the east that I never really seemed to catch up with, though as the sun lowered behind me, I kept seeing rainbows. (In one place along the Thruway there had even been some congestion that could only be explained by people rubber-necking at the rainbow.) As I passed through the scenic landscape of forest, swamps, and wind farms, I wanted to snap some pictures with my phone. But of course, my phone is terrible so it kept causing me trouble. At first it was complaining about not having enough storage space, something it continued doing even after I'd erased some movies. It turned out that I had to restart the phone to reclaim that space. But then my phone said it was overheating and went into dark mode, but this obscured parts of the UI and now I couldn't figure out how to use Google Maps, which I depended on to navigate. Eventually I had enough room to take pictures of the windmills against the dark and stormy sky, but then after I'd taken not all that many photographs it again complained about space.
As I approached the cabin on Woodworth Lake Road, I made a few stops to gather more stones for that wall I am building near the entrance to our parcel. It was only a little after 7:00pm when I made it back to the cabin.
The wind farm. Click to enlarge.
A beautiful barn in the wind farm. Click to enlarge.
A beautiful garden in the wind farm. Click to enlarge.
More of the wind farm. Click to enlarge.
Forests near the Adirondacks. Click to enlarge.
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