Friday Sep 14, 2018

Before leaving on the trip I made a list of possible places to visit in New England but had not planned any route to connect them. This is my normal approach and I usually decide my actual route using the AAA maps website which shows designated scenic routes. Well, on Wednesday something happened and scenic routes are no longer displayed even though the option is still there. In order to plan I had to go to a AAA office to pick up paper maps, which also show the scenic routes, so I decided to spend the day in Albany doing a little sightseeing and planning the next few days.

As the capital of New York State I had expected Albany to have a frenetic, crowded center but was pleasantly surprised to find a compact, walkable and quiet city. After picking up my maps I headed to The Empire State Plaza which has the Capitol building at one end, the New York State Museum and Library at the other and is surrounded by several high rise office buildings that contain the state agencies. The plaza itself consists of three lakes with fountains, wide walkways, sculptures and The Egg (see photo below).

The museum was wonderful with exhibits that seemed to cover anything and everything about the state and I really liked the structure used to describe the displays. There were large boards that had a sentence or two summarizing a section, several smaller boards with paragraphs describing each case/diorama/display and then detailed descriptions of each artifact in small print. I know it sounds like most museums but, for some reason, I found it very easy to quickly see what might interest me and get to the level of detail I wanted. After spending about three hours there I had barely scratched the surface of what it has to offer but needed to return to the hotel to plan. Based on that planning, I don’t expect Internet access tomorrow night so, hopefully, posts will resume on Sunday.

The New York State Capitol building dates from 1899.
At the opposite end of The Empire State Plaza is the New York State Museum and Library which opened in 1976. The high-rise blocks house the state government agencies.
The Egg stands in one corner of the plaza and is a performing arts center that opened in 1978. Inside are two theaters.
A couple of artifacts that I found interesting in the New York State Museum were a portable steam engine from 1850 and an almost complete mastodon skeleton found in 1866. The steam engine was pulled by horses to the location where its power was needed, e.g. for cutting down trees, and the saw would be connected to it with belts over one of the two flywheels.