Day 11, Adirondacks and Western Massachusetts

Today started slow with a stop to the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory. I was assured on the phone that the factory would be making bears today but when we got there we were told otherwise. We decided the tour wasn't worth the entrance fee so we left and made our way to a ferry across Lake Champlain to upstate New York and then on to western Massachusetts.

Our first real stop was at the Lake Placid Olympic Training Center, where we got to go bobsledding down the concrete track used in the '80 Olympics. The ride lasted 39.07 seconds, as we flew down the 1/2 mile course at 55 mph. It was so much fun, it immediately became one of my favorites for the vacation so far. Afterwards, we took a tour of the newer course, which is used for training. We got the opportunity to walk down this mile long course which would be used for bobsledding, luge, and the skeleton. After we were done with this part of the Training Center, we made our way over to the Ski Jump. We had to take a chair lift and then an elevator up 26 stories in order to see the ramp the skiers jump from. It was hard to imagine that anyone would be crazy enough to launch themselves into the air at a height like this. There were also some people training in a pool down below, so we watched them do a couple jumps too. The passes we had received also got us onto a gondola which took us the summit of Little Whiteface Mountain. The ride up was really fun, but we didn't stay for long; we wanted to go the summit of the actual Whiteface Mountain. We drove 8 miles up an extemely bumpy road in order to get the the summit of this mountain. From the summit we had a great view of all the surrounding mountains and Lake Placid.

We decided to end the day by visiting Mount Greylock in Massachusetts. At the summit was a monument dedicated to soliders of all wars. The monument looked like a lighthouse, and had quotes about death engraved all around it. We didn't stay here for long either because it started raining shortly after we arrived. We did have enough time to get in a couple pictures before it really started pouring, so we left the park and drove to our hotel.