A few days at the lake house and summer arrives with a bang

VALOIS, New York, USA - The arrival of summer was heralded this past week by the simultaneous arrival of our amigos Steve and Pam from Sacramento. They came in for a few days visit on their way to Ohio.

Pam and Steve

And even though the visit was short, we packed in a lake trip on the Spirit of Louise, some wine tasting, a Savard's breakfast, several trips to Watkins Glen, hiking around the property and witnessing a couple of whopper thunderstorms.

We also went to Tina and Eric Hazlitt's beachside cabana for a glass (or two) of wine where Steve and Pam posed for the photo on the left, with Tina and Eric's sailboat in the background.

It looks like a postcard to me.

Pam and Steve are used to the more benign weather of Sacramento and the sudden shifts were sort of shocking. As they left this morning, a cold front roared down the lake and dropped the temperature at the lake house by about 10 degrees in about as many minutes.

Yes, there was plenty of rain in those clouds

Tuesday,  a thunderstorm rolled in just as I was taking a swim off the end of the dock of the Valois Point Yacht Club.

I waited about five minutes too long to grab my stuff and run up the hill.

Next up this week is a fundraiser for Kathleen Schamel's great motoring adventure across Europe to Mongolia as part of a charity for people in Asia and elsewhere.

She will be traveling as part of a road rally team. The rally cars, are, well, pretty small and the roads are, well, pretty non-existent in some of the places they need to traverse.

Still, she's game and the photos from the trip are going to be collector's items.

Here is the link to her team's website: Kathleen's Excellent Adventure

The fund raiser tomorrow will be at the Village Marina Bar and Grill, which, totally coincidentally, is owned by her parents, Mike and Karen Schamel, and run by her brother Mike. It also is being billed as a pre-game party to the three-day Phish concert that starts Friday at the Watkins Glen race track where about 40,000 Phish fans are expected to descend, en masse, for music, parties and, well, more parties.

And it's likely I will be among that throng, writing some short news articles for a local newspaper.

It won't be Woodstock Redux, but it should be interesting.

Carlos Santana at Woodstock - 1969