August 4, 2011 Rochester NY

Today is our trip to the finger lakes and wine country. Enterprise picked us up in the car we would rent at about 8:15. By 9:00 we were on the road. Our first stop was McDonald's for coffee and then to a marine radio store. Lew had hoped to replace his cockpit speakers as the grills on them were broken, but the store was not yet open.

We then went to Pultneyville to check out the Harbor and yacht club. It was a very nice village and marina, but pretty small. Our sailboats would have been the largest there by far, although there was a large trawler on the visiting dock. The channel was small and we would not want to try and enter it on a day with high wind and big seas. We were smart to sail by and go to Rochester. We did mail Anne and Nate's 5th anniversary card from Pultneyville.

We drove to Geneva which is a little town at the top of Seneca Lake, the biggest of the Finger Lakes. I took a picture of the map. Hopefully you can see the detail of the lakes and all the wineries around them. There are dozens of wineries. We stopped at several for tastings. We drink red wines. Lew had warned us that the red wines here are not good. He was right. We did not find anything other than a port wine that we liked enough to buy. We did taste some very nice white wines though. Gretchen found a lot she liked and ended up buying a case of different wines throughout the day.

On the way back we stopped at a Walmart where I bought a nice new fishing pole. Then we stopped at a Wegmans Grocery and stocked up on food. We will be in Port Dalhousie Saturday, but are not sure about there grocery situation.. Tomorrow we are sailing to Oak Orchard, also called Point Breeze, and there is not much there. Lew and I stopped at West Marine and found a pair of replacement speakers on sale for $31

We had planned to go to dinner at the marina restaurant where we had coupons for 4 free beers, but we didn’t get back to the boats until 7:30, and once we had a much needed martini, no one felt like going out to dinner. Kerry made a nice sandwich for us.

Jim Karpinski called during the day and said that he would be unable to make it for our Welland trip due to work constraints - another reason he should be retired I pointed out. This caused a scramble by our crew members Kip and Jennifer (Lew’s daughter) who planned to ride up with Jim. By the end of the day it appeared alternative arrangements had been made.