Saturday, our fifth FULL day in Ithaca, our sixth day total in Ithaca, and our seventh trip day. Saturday meant THE ITHACA FARMER'S MARKET.
I was So. EXCITED. I was also so prepared to spend a wild amount of money here. Like. SO. PREPARED. My limitation was not money, rather a lack of time to eat all of the freshies I wanted to purchase. So sadly, we stuck to buying things that we could either immediately consume, or would travel well, or was a shelf stable item.
Look at this open air goodness!!! I was just delighted to be walking through the Farmer's Market.
Only Derek and I went, sadly. Everybody else stayed at home. We went fairly early, and everyone was just on the cusp of awake when we left for the market. Rhyann had also requested a down day to collect herself before Sunday's trip to Alexandria Bay, so we left her to herself and didn't ask if she wanted to come.
There was a really cool distillery that I had wanted us to visit on the day we had set aside at the end of the trip for visiting booze-y places. Thankfully, they were vendors at the market.
It was a little early for me to be sampling liquor, but Derek was on vacation, so he sampled everything for me. Mushroom booze!!! What a novelty!!!
The person that we spoke to at the stall made sure I took a photo of their concoction menu so we could try the drinks on our own. We haven't yet. We haven't opened the booze yet, honestly. We meant to every night that we were there, but I was always tired, and I would fall asleep before the chance to get some booze presented itself. So my dad didn't get to try it. I felt kind of bad about having my "nobody tries this before me" rule, but it's a hard and fast rule. Nobody tries my vittles before ME tries my vittles!!
It was actually pretty quiet at the market, which surprised me. I was expecting a larger crowd, but it was also relatively early in the day. I assume it got busier.
When the kids and I were wandering along Niagara River, we found a massive patch of what I now know are garlic leeks!!! I took this photo for Rhyann to show her, and I forgot to send it to her. Those garlic leek look sexy as fuck, though.
I wanted to take so many more photos of the market, but the people at the stalls were looking at me in such a way that I assumed they didn't want me to take photos of their stalls. Even when I was purchasing something. And...Derek and I purchased a lot. Keep in mind that while we spent an amount that any rational accountant would qualify as irrational and lacking in responsible decision making skills, this is a haul that is actually quite restrained. I could have easily spent another 400 dollars there, had we had another week to eat everything I wanted to buy.
So Derek bought these meats from a local farm, which was something I had really wanted to do and talked about a lot before we left. I do not like to eat meat, but I wanted to have a meal made entirely of local meats and produce and leafies while I was there. Because I got bitten by a tick before we left, and I was awaiting the results of the tick autopsy to see if it had Alpha-gal (fun fact: someone at the lab I was at today was diagnosed with that! When I tell you they were mad, I really, really mean it. So not such a fun fact for them, it seems), so I was insistent on eating none of the small amounts of meat I had planned on eating. But that didn't stop Derek from getting all of these cuts for himself and everyone else!
I love love LOVE anything and everything fermented, so when I saw this stall, I had to check out what they had. That taller bottle is lemon basil switchel, a drink I had never had before. Switchel is a fermented drink made from a ginger bug, I believe, and vinegar. I just looked it up, and I was...close? It's vinegar and water, flavored with everything from ginger to honey to whatever else was available. It's also called Haymaker's Punch, because it was particularly enjoyed by colonizer farmers in the hot months when it was time to harvest the hay. However, I read another account that states that switchel was a drink that originated in the Caribbean. And it would make a lot of sense that that's how colonizers got ahold of the recipe.
I love pickled beets, but not the store bought ones. Derek loves pickled beets just about any way they're served to him, so I picked up a bottle of ginger garlic pickled beets, and my latest pickled obsession, thanks to Kati, is dilly beans. Obvy had to grab a jar of those. Still snacking on them, they're almost gone!
I wanted to buy a thing of plan, local honey for Rhyann, and a box of honey with fresh comb in it for Derek and Alex, since neither of them have ever experienced the joy of eating a warm, freshy sllice of comb with the stickiest, most golden honey pouring out of it. But I totally forgot to go back to the stall, because after stopping here for some specialty honey, my brain said I was finished with my honey task and I had nothing left to do. The big jar is Cacao Kapow, a honey with chocolate and pepper. The little jar to its right is Sweet Heat, which is just honey with pepper (and it's potent! I tried a tiny little bit, it's absolutely lovely). The next two little jars are special flower honeys: bergamot, and aster cardamom.
Each one of them a thick delight.
We also stopped by a hot sauce booth. Hot sauce is something I'm fairly desperate to start fermenting myself. It's part of the reason I grow some of the things I grow in my garden. Derek also tried all of these for me, and I felt confident with his reactions in getting these three:
The only one Derek doesn't feel good about is 3 Cs, but I myself love a good chocolate coffee hot sauce base, so I was sold on the name alone I've tried the other two, and they are divinity.
And here are our boozes!!!
I bought the Ithaca is Vodka vodka to make some more limoncello, but I also wanted two big bottles of the mushroom vodkas. The Hen of the Woods has, apparently, won awards. And whether this was a marketing tactic or not, we were told it was her last bottle, and we snapped it up so nobody else could.
We also got a little sampler, since I couldn't try the samples at the stall. Cuties!!!
And without picturing the meat, there's everything we bought at the farmer's market!! OH! I forgot that we also bought an herbed cheese from a local dairy. Snow something or other. I keep forgetting to use it, because there is havarti dill in my fridge, and we've been finishing the goat cheese we got a few days after this.
Before we left the market, Derek talked about being very hungry. And understandably. There were so many food stalls there, not just with fresh produce, but with freshy fresh cooked foods. We passed a gorgeous Thai stall, a Vietnamese Stall, a Cambodian Stall, a vegan pasty stall, a sandwich stall, there were so many options Derek could choose from. The Cambodian place really stood out to me, as did the Vietnamese stall. Derek brought me and our treats to the car and then went back to get himself some food. He chose the Thai stall.
He had chosen...poorly.
The food was not bad, but it wasn't great. Derek was really disappointed, and pretty unhappy that he didn't go with the Cambodian place that we both agreed looked and smelled amazing.
We picked up my dad and Alex, and made our way to Taughannock Falls to do the trail that takes you to the base of the falls. It was another absolutely beautiful day.
Derek and I stayed at these falls to take photos, and my dad forged ahead with Alex. We lumbered along the river bed, which still had a little bit of creek water running through it.
Derek was very busy photographing what he assumed was a copperhead or a water moccasin, but I googled it. It was not! It was just a regular ol' New York water snake. there are 17 types of snake in New York, and only 3 are venomous. The water snake, while aggressive, is not one of them.
Here are some photos from our walk along the river bed! There was plenty of room to splash around, and it was warm enough to be tempting, but all the signage told us to not.
What an adorable shelf falls!! The fringing on the trees from my cell phone doing the most to HDR the image is annoying, but other than that, this does a great job of showing what a beautiful day it was.
Not all of us are sign readers, I see.
And look!
Kyle was here! A cliff dweller, if I'm understanding this sign?
Here we are, at the base of the falls. As you can see, the light was not what I would call suitable for long exposure photos, even with a circular polarizer and a ten stop. So when Derek and I caught up to my dad and Alex and assessed the lighting situation, we decided we'd hit up Taughannock tomorrow, along with all of the other things we were going back to rephotograph.
Two hams and some cheese!
Neither of us are actually red faced. That's just my phone camera being weird.
There's Alex, way up ahead on the trail there. She speed walked ahead of my dad, Derek, and I because she gets impatient about leaving, but forgets that we're the ones with the keys.
Here she is, mask and all, enjoying the Ithaca sunshine.
So much sand was falling at an alarming rate from this hill. I was wary about a mini rock slide. I have about ten minutes of video, because if there was going to be a rock slide, I wanted to catch it, dammit. But luckily...sadly?...no such event occurred.
I also loved this knot of trees. It was actually on the hill, and something you kind of had to walk underneath. Super cool, but this picture at this angle does the reality of this no justice.
After Taughannock, we still had a few hours of daylight left, so we drove to Robert H. Tremens. Or Enfield, depending on who you're asking. I myself tend to say "Lucifer Falls" when referring to upper Tremens, and Enfield when referring to lower Tremens, but that's just me.
Here is the falls right next to the mill. I spent a little too long here, even though I knew I didn't like the light.
Here's Alex, looking like she hadn't just been delivering a fuck load of shitty attitude! But I'm not fooled! I remember. I REMEMBER EVERYTHING.
There's Alex walking into Devil's Kitchen proper. I turned around and giddily told Derek this was my favorite part of the gorge. Because it is!!
Devil's Kitchen!!!! And if you look REALLY hard, you can see Alex on the bridge.
See? She's checking out the gorge below. And how romantic and bucolic is that stone bridge?
A better look at Devil's Kitchen, full and proper.
This is the backwards view of Devil's Kitchen if you're looking toward the parking lot area.
This is the view from the bridge. Doesn't this look like it could be the pacific northwest?
And can't you just see a merson here? I certainly can.
Ithaca, or Multnomah? The answer won't surprise you, but it might if you didn't know I was in Ithaca. Or if you're a botanist.
Winding our way downwards! There is a whole gorge trail that you can take and loop around, down to the bottom, and back up to the top on the other side, and it brings you all the way back to the parking lot. It's a slog. And not something anybody in the party wanted to do. Today, anyway. Derek and I really wanted to do it. Alas! We were thwarted by time. Because we are heinous time wasters when it comes to photo taking. We just set up camp and stay there until one of us, or someone we're with, shoves us out of our head and forces us to move along.
Like at this waterfall, for instance. I spent a solid twenty minutes here JUST trying to get the right framing. I didn't even end up wanting an of the shots because the light in the background was uneven. Should it have taken twenty minutes for me to figure that out? No. And yet.
Derek went for the higher vantage. I am unsure of how that turned out for him. He still hasn't edited all of his photos.
Look at that hot man piece!
Another angle. Who knows if it will turn out? I haven't edited my photos, either!! Suck it, time management!
Here we are, folks!!! Lucifer Falls. The best part of the whole hike. I was so happy to see it!!!
Nevermind us chatting, just focus on the falls! In the shade. Lighting is not your friend in this gorge at this time of day.
Look how valiantly he is attempting to fight against what we both know is awful, awful light! Is this episode 3 of Hot Guy Dumb Shit (TM)? The theme song of which is sung to the tune of Good Day Sunshine, of course?
My dad took Alex back up to the car the way they came, but wanted to go to Enfield, so Derek and I opted to take the two mile trail down. For the most part, we had been running into people on the trail that were rude, no interest in sharing space or even saying excuse me as they bulldozed their way past Derek and I. Right when we crested this corner, we crossed paths with the most polite group of hikers! They walked to their side of the path, Derek and I walked to our side, we all smiled and sad hello to each other, and there was something so lovely about them being so lovely with us that I was elated for a solid five minutes after our tiny interaction.
The hike down is also a hike up. And after a day of walking around, I was hot and crabby and I didn't have a shirt with long enough shoulder coverage. My camera bag really digs into my skins, because it's heavy and the shoulder straps are patterned. Derek had to switch bags with me because they were digging into my skin so hard it was breaking through my skin.
When we got to the bottom, we found a little friend chipmunk! And it had a secret food stash!
This chipmunk was the absolute cutest.
I had a video of it grabbing mushrooms out of its little tree trunk stash, but it's too big to upload, even after compressing it the way I've been compressing everything else.
We were stopped by a pair of hikers who spotted us and suspected we were properly outfitted with hikig accoutrements, and asked us if we had any bug spray they could use. Well of course we did! We chatted with them as they put on the bug spray, they told us they pegged us for super prepared hikers by the gear we were lugging around. When they were finished, they thanked us and assured us they would pay it forward, which seemed unnecessary, but appreciated all the same. I'm not so fucked up as to demand someone not do something nice for others just because what I did for them was so small!
We met up with my dad and Alex, walked to Enfield, hung out for a little, and then we went back home. We stopped at Wegmans first, because of course we did. I'm not sure we watched Stranger Things on this evening, but I want to say we didn't. The next day was going to be a buy day for the kids and my dad, and a busy, early day for Derek and myself.
Edited to add that I forgot to post the photos I took with my camera. I am not enamored with them. I am so disappointed with the quality of what I've been producing this trip.
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