Wendy's trip log: Seneca Lake Camping Trip Part I

After getting all packed and ready to go, we were off to spend the next three days camping along Seneca Lake in Watkins Glen State Park. No changes had been made with the additional friends who were suppose to be coming, so it was a trip with only my boys and Mary with her boys. We still had an amazing time and Watkins Glen State park is scoring HIGH on my personal marks for AWESOME PLACES!!!
I left early on Thursday morning with plans to stop along the way. We shot across central NY along the interstate arriving at Geneva NY around 11am. (camping check in is at 3pm) Last year we stopped in Geneva at the Seneca Lake State Park for a little spray park action, when we got Riley last summer. I decided that we should have a picnic lunch and some more fun this time.

When we arrived there were a few school buses. This usually is my first sign of "lets get out of here", but it seemed like these kids were fairly contained, however there was NO Spray coming out of the SPRAY PARK area!!!

I started to get a little worried...what is up with that? The boys were already NOT enjoying the idea of stopping in the first place, and now there is NO SPRAY!!! I consider that perhaps the beach is where the fun is, so I head down to take a look.

Beach is not open either and there were about 2-dozen dead decaying fish washed up along the shore. EWEEE!!! The sky look so beautiful, but this beach was NOT at all looking like a place I would want to plop down with my beach towel and sand toys. YUCK....Fortunately, the boys were at least a little willing to play on the playground, which really is quite nice.

They might be a bit to big for some of this equipment, and perhaps they were right about being to big to enjoy the sprayground too, but I just knew if the water turned on they would change their minds and take a run through a few times.

They played for a bit, I prayed that the spray park would open, (it never did while we were there anyways) and finally I gave up on finding fun for these boys here at Seneca Lake State Park before we had lunch and were back on the road.
We headed down rt 14 south to meet up with tip of Seneca Lake. We were in wine country and I thought I needed to at least make one stop at one of these wineries along the way...and when I saw this SIGN along the road, I knew this was the winery for me.

(My cropping photo tool is messed up, sorry it is so far away)

The boys should have come in with me, because I am sure if they did I would not have done some tasting. $3- got me six tastes and $3- off my choice of bottles. They were all YUMMY, but I choose a carbonated sweet wine called, Big Reds.

Now I had myself a few bottles of wine for the campsite, I was also informed that this weekend was the Wine Festival. Had I known that and all the girls had come with me, we would have had a BLAST of a time at that. Friday night was a toga party... maybe next year.
About another 20 miles we made it to the village of Watkins Glen. We still had a little bit of time before we could get in the campground site, so we stopped at the village park.

We had a nice walk along the dock enjoying the lake, the sun, and the boats.

The boys asked about a schooner boat ride, but at $29- per person we decided a walk out on the rocks was a far out to sea as we were going to get.

It sure is Beautiful!!

A few more beauty pictures, and a silly one....

The boys imitating the movie Titanic. A vast contrast of the lake and the countryside littered with farms and GRAPES, and oh yeah and don't forget about RACECARS!

We did a small amount of tourist trapping and stopped at this unusual store front. (Same place I stopped with the girls on the wine tour) before posing in the gallows!