This week was the first of our two summer camping trips in NY. We have a light summer planned, since we knew it would be a busy few months with Connor’s move in June and our upcoming move this Fall. We headed out of Rochester Monday morning with Chautauqua Lake as our GPS destination. From this point forward, I will use CHQ in place of Chautauqua since it’s a particularly challenging word to spell and type! Interestingly, it comes from the Erie people who died off before a study of their language could be completed, so no one knows what it means!

Anyway, CHQ Lake is in the southwest corner of NY, not far from the PA border…about a 2.5 hour drive from Rochester. We arrived at our campground mid-afternoon; the campground is on the west side of the lake, at about the mid-point…but alas, our campsite does not have a water view. It’s a good-size campground with lots of seasonal sites where people spend the entire summer here…especially nice for boaters given the easy water access! CHQ Lake is similar to the Finger Lakes…inland lake, 17 miles long, 2 miles wide, and just 78 feet deep. The lake is at an elevation of 1,308 feet above sea level, higher than any of the Finger Lakes, and one of the highest navigable lakes in North America!

Tuesday morning we ventured out to Panama Rocks, a privately owned area that has amazing rock formations that you can hike through/around. I happened to find it on TripAdvisor as the top-rated attraction in the area…otherwise, I’m not sure we would have gone there. Wow! It was just incredible! Another amazing example of nature’s beauty. It’s truly hard to describe, so hopefully the photos will help to tell the story! The hike was about a mile, on very uneven ground, and they do encourage people to climb in and around the rocks…after you sign a liability waiver, of course. There was hardly anyone there so it was very easy to get up close to whatever we wanted. So glad we found this place and spent the morning there…highly recommend!

These photos will give you a sense of scale and the enormity of these rocks…we look so small and insignificant!

Our afternoon was something completely different…we took the short drive to Jamestown NY (at the southern end of CHQ Lake) and visited the National Comedy Center. The museum just opened in 2018, and helps to fulfill Jamestown native Lucille Ball’s vision that her hometown would be a destination for the celebration of comedy. It’s incredibly interactive and loads of fun (as one would expect!). Mark and I had a wonderful afternoon there, enjoying stand-up, tv, movies, cartoons, memes, and more! Everyone gets a wristband with a chip in it, and you start by selecting comedians, movies, and tv shows that you enjoy…then, throughout the museum, you ‘tap in’ and they personalize the experience based on your selections. Very cool! They even email you a summary of your visit at the end. We were impressed! Another highly recommend!

On Wednesday, we ventured to the East side of CHQ Lake, starting with Bemus Point, a cute little town that once offered the only way to get across the lake, via a ferry. Then, I-86 was built just south of Bemus Point, and now the ferry just runs in the summer and is more of a tourist attraction than a mode of transport! The town has lots of shops and restaurants and the historic Hotel Lenhart, celebrating 142 years! The lobby had that delightful musty smell that you would expect of a 142-year old hotel.

Then we were off to Midway State Park, one of the oldest continuously operating amusement parks in the country! It first opened in 1898 and was privately owned and operated until it became a state park in 2006. It has had several incarnations, first as a trolley park, then a dance hall and roller rink were added, followed by a carousel and the traditional kiddie amusement park rides! It’s on the National Register of Historic Places and reminded us of a smaller, earlier version of Seabreeze in Rochester. I rode the historic Herschell carousel (from North Tonawanda, NY, near Buffalo), and we walked around the park and by the water before enjoying our lunch in their picnic area. I love that they still use “tickets” for rides (although they do offer wristbands for unlimited rides!).

After lunch, we made the drive to Lake Erie, to visit the Dunkirk Lighthouse. It was established in 1826 and the current tower was first lit in 1875. We toured the lightkeeper’s house and the lighthouse (it was automated in 1960, so no more keeper!) and made the 55-step climb on the spiral staircase to the top of the tower. They have an extensive collection of military memorabilia in their museum, as well, plus some old Coast Guard ships on the property. Very interesting and historic! They had several posters displaying the many shipwrecks on the Great Lakes, so you do have to wonder how effective these lighthouses are!?!?

Our next stop as we headed back to our campground was the town of Westfield, NY, which has a famous resident in 12-year-old Grace Bedell. In 1860, she wrote to then-candidate Abraham Lincoln and suggested that “whiskers would improve his appearance”. As we all know, he did grow a beard, and when he traveled through Westfield as President-Elect Lincoln in 1861, he told the story to the crowd and met young Grace. There’s a beautiful statue in Westfield to represent their meeting…

Wednesday evening’s plans centered around the Chautauqua Institution (which I shall henceforth refer to as CQI), one of my primary motives in visiting this area. I’ve known of CQI for many years, as a place where people go for education, arts, spirituality, etc. and decided I wanted to check it out before we check out of NY. Back in April, I looked at their summer schedule (which is packed with events!) to see what Mark and I might enjoy attending, and found “Carl Reiner at 100. Celebrating a Comedy Legacy.”  So, we planned our camping trip around this event. The show ticket allowed us access to the fully gated/fenced grounds starting at 4pm, so we arrived around 6pm (2+ hours before the show), after the rain ended. It’s a fascinating place, with 400 permanent residents who live in beautiful homes that are all part of a historic district. Each summer, over 100K people visit the institution for the summer programs they offer. It was founded in 1874 as a teaching camp for Sunday-school teachers who would arrive via steamboat on the lake. The institution was the home of the “Chautauqua Movement” that became popular in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Teddy Roosevelt once said that Chautauqua is “the most American thing in America.” Their current programs emphasize the arts, education, religion, and music. The grounds are beautiful, with flower gardens everywhere. The location on the lake is, of course, spectacular, and the Athenaeum hotel is said to be the largest wooden building in the Eastern US.

Palestine Park is interesting…it’s a scale model of the Holy Land, including cities, hills, rivers, and seas, in approximately accurate geographical relation. CHQ Lake represents the Mediterranean Sea, and there are hills representing biblical landmarks as well as markers for the cities. This was created as a visual aid for teaching biblical history and geography to the Sunday-school teachers. The scale is 21 inches to 1 mile.

We explored the grounds for a while, shopped in the bookstore, and stopped for some ice cream at one of the many restaurants on the property, then headed to the 4,000-seat amphitheater for the show. Carl Reiner would have been 100 this year (he passed away in 2020), and this was a tribute to all he contributed to comedy in his lifetime. It was timed to coincide with the ribbon-cutting of a new Carl Reiner exhibit at the National Comedy Center (so we missed this exhibit by exactly ONE day…), and his three children all came to Western NY for the events. The two-hour show was filled with clips from Carl’s TV shows and movies, as well as video tributes from people he worked with like Dick Van Dyke, Steve Martin, Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin, and Mel Brooks. His children all shared memories and stories, and you just got the feeling that, in addition to being an incredible writer, actor, and director, he was a wonderful person, too! One of the key messages was that he was the best collaborator. Of course, Rob Reiner is the most famous of the children, having followed in his father’s footsteps, and his other two children, Lucas and Annie, are both gifted artists. On the stage, they had two chairs setup which apparently came from Reiner’s house…he sat in one and Mel Brooks sat in the other each night as they watched Jeopardy together. The chairs will be part of the exhibit at the National Comedy Center. It was a fun-filled two hours, and Mark and I definitely brought down the average age of the audience. CQI has a very age-diverse audience, but I guess Carl Reiner fans skew a bit older! What can I say…Mark and I have a sincere appreciation for “The Dick Van Dyke Show” even though Mark was VERY young then and I only ever saw it in reruns.

Thursday morning was overcast and rainy but we didn’t have anything planned, so it worked out well. The rain cleared around lunchtime, and we headed back to Jamestown for a Lucille Ball kind of day. First stop, the Lucy Desi Museum. There are two sections of the museum – one that focuses on “I Love Lucy”, and the other that tells of their personal lives. A few interesting tidbits that I learned:

• By the time Lucy starred in “I Love Lucy” starting in the early 50s, she had already spent 20+ years in Hollywood and had starred in over 70 feature films! This was amazing to me – I had no idea!
• She was 40 when her daughter was born, and her son arrived two years later (and the related episode of “I Love Lucy” saw peak ratings).
• “I Love Lucy” quickly became the top rated show on TV, with 11 million people watching (and there were only 15 million TV sets!)
• Her childhood in Jamestown was difficult, after her father died young and her mother remarried and left Lucy and her brother to be raised by their grandfather.

Desilu Studios was groundbreaking, using cinematic techniques for a TV show. After her divorce from Desi Arnaz, Lucy bought out his stake in the studio and in 1962, she became the first woman to run a major TV studio. Desilu produced an impressive list of shows, including Star Trek and Mission Impossible, and it ultimately became Paramount Television.

From the museum, we walked to a few of the murals in Jamestown that feature Lucy…all massive and beautifully done!

Next stop…her gravesite in Lakeview Cemetery. Clearly, lots of people visit there because there’s a white line with red “I Love Lucy” hearts painted on the road from the entrance to the gravesite, to help with wayfinding. Interesting story…after Lucy’s death in 1989, she was interred in Los Angeles. 13 years later, her family had her remains moved and buried in Jamestown, along with her Mother, Father, and Brother.

And, last stop on the Lucy tour…Lucille Ball Memorial Park, at the southern tip of CHQ Lake. There are two statues of Lucy here. One is nicknamed “Scary Lucy”…the artist who was commissioned did a horrible job and it was quite the story and hubbub in Western NY when the statue was unveiled and people didn’t think it looked like her and that it was actually a bit scary looking. And it is. Ugh. Seven years later, another sculptor was hired and she did a much better job of representing this icon in a polka-dotted dress. Apparently the scary version had become such a tourist attraction that they decided to keep it, 75 feet away from the new version.

Again, Mark and I only ever saw “I Love Lucy” in reruns, but we enjoyed our Lucy tour to honor a woman who had a tremendous impact on comedy and is such a huge part of the history of television (and movies, from what I learned at the museum!)

Driving back to the campground from Jamestown, we saw this sign that had us a bit puzzled…a ‘gray’ light? Why is it not red? I’m guessing they bought the sign on sale, as-is, with no red…(the actual signal did, indeed, have a red light on it!)

Friday morning it was time to pack up and check out of Camp CHQ. I had read about a sculpture park that was about an hour northeast of the campground (in the general direction of home), so we decided to make a stop there on our way back to Rochester. From Google satellite view, the parking lot looked a bit tight, so we didn’t hook up the car…drove separately figuring it would be easier to maneuver the vehicles individually. Good call, since Mark did have to back up a couple times and you just can’t do that with a car attached! Oh, and fortunately, Mark noticed a “road closed” sign in the final stretch that our GPS and Google Maps did not know about…or we would have had a bit of a challenge with that. Instead, we just rerouted and got there a slightly different way. This place is truly in the middle of nowhere…East Otto, NY…but it’s beautiful there, in the “Enchanted Mountains” of Western New York. We had lunch in the RV, and then ventured out to enjoy some of the sculptures. You could probably spend 3 or 4 hours wandering around the trails; there are over 250 sculptures to see. We only spent about 45 minutes on some of the easier trails, but what a wonderful assortment of sculptures in a gorgeous setting! Insects. People. Interesting shapes. So much more…and most were sculpted by one man, Larry Griffis Jr. (hence the name of the park, Griffis Sculpture Park!)

And from there, we stopped at a Lowe’s parking lot to hook up the car, and it was time to head back to Rochester – about two hours from there. We had a wonderful week exploring this part of NY…saw so much that we’d never seen before and truly enjoyed all of it! To close, here are the jokes we received just before we left the National Comedy Center on Tuesday…LOL!