Lake George NY – SE Mass (via Saratoga NHP)
Sun Sept 15, 2019
(~255 miles)

All good things come to an end, and today brought about the closing of another great NER trip. It was time to ride home, and Char agreed that a visit to Saratoga National Historical Park would be a great way to wrap up the weekend by absorbing a final bit of the history of this region. Luckily, Saratoga was in a homeward direction and, even better, Ed had created a “Saratoga Ride” loop that would bring us right through the park and beyond. I created a route to home that included the first half of his loop, and after a final breakfast and some goodbyes at the hotel, we left the Windgate hotel on a beautiful morning.

This time, we got on the right track headed south on back roads in parallel to I-87 into Queensbury. Nice to know about this back way to avoid all the shopping outlet traffic over on US-9, for next time we’re up here. We followed Glenn Falls Mountain Road west to skirt the Hudson River briefly, on near-deserted roads this early Sunday morning.

We passed through Corinth and turned to the southeast, following nice rural roads down to the town of Victory, on another stretch of the Hudson. We stopped here to gander at the Saratoga Monument, a huge stonework obelisk constructed to memorialize the critical battles and lives lost several miles south in the park lands we were about to visit.

We were the only visitors at this hour and the morning sunlight was fantastic on the chiseled stone, against green grass and surrounding woods. We continued through the quiet village and rode south on NY 32 for a few more miles to reach the main grounds of the National Park.

We captured a couple obligatory shots of the entrance sign alongside another family of early-risers in a minivan. We headed in to the visitor center and arrived right as the doors were opened for the day. One of the rangers gave us and the other early visitors his welcoming spiel, before we all decided to head right in to the small theater to watch the 20 minute introductory video about the park’s history that runs on a loop throughout the day.

The film helped get our minds into the historical period and events of the time, then we walked around the museum exhibits on display there for another 45 minutes or so. There were replica uniforms of American and British soliders, plus plenty of artifacts found on the property including cannon, muskets, swords, blades, buttons and farming implements.

One of the best exhibits was this miniature 3D replica map of the entire Saratoga battlefield area. There are colored LED lights mounted underneath the map that light up to show troop movements in step with an audio track that relates the sequential events of the battles that occurred here. It was cleverly done and clearly helps you comprehend the lay of the land and how it affected battle strategies for the opposing forces.

They have an entire room dedicated to Benedict Arnold, a complex presence in history due to his extreme heroism and achievement in battle, personality foibles and conflicts with superior officers, followed by his well-known betrayal of his comrades and our new nation. I commented to Char that I couldn’t stop thinking about one of our fave AMC shows, Turn: Washington’s Spies, a well-acted dramatization of events during the Revolutionary War period. Arnold’s character was both sympathetic and vile, as the man apparently could not rise above pettiness and self-aggrandizement.

After getting a good overview of the historical events, it was time to ride out on the battlefield ourselves, to visualize events unfolding around us in the thick woods and thickets. There is a nicely paved one-way loop road that takes visitors through the park, with numbered stops to highlight historical structures, strategic locations, and critical points in the fighting.

The park website offers a mobile app you can use to play pre-recorded explanations of what we were looking at. We’d figured out the night before how I could share the audio from my phone through our Sena bluetooth connection, though it meant we’d need to spend the majority of the tour with our helmets on.

To help visualize which side held which ground, the park uses white posts with colored tops to show the estimated lines of territory held by the Continentals (blue) and British (red). The American headquarters was centered around this small farmstead on a high clear hill set back away from the river.

While watching the LED lights flash on the battleground model at the visitor center, I kept wondering why the troops moved only through certain paths through the hills and swales, often not in direct lines toward the enemy. Seeing the thickness of the vegetation (which the park attempts to keep historically accurate to the period), it is more obvious and you marvel at the difficulty and logistics of moving men and war supplies through such terrain at all.

 

Some of the stops required short hikes on easy paved paths to take in the views and informational signs. This made a nice excuse to get off the bike and take in the landscape and battle history more thoroughly.

After visiting a few stops at the colonists’ side of the park, we crossed enemy lines to see what the Brits had been up to.

Several mobile cannon carts were arranged at various spots to give a better idea of where the defenses were watching against enemy incursions.

Upon reaching the former wheat fields where battle was first engaged, we were surprised to see our riding companions from yesterday, Lisa and Bob, come riding in to park behind us. Apparently, they’d had the same idea as us, making use of Ed’s routing to visit this park on their way home today.

They had skipped the visitor center and we told them it was worth a stop if they had time after the loop road. We also clued them in to the web app so they could reap the benefits of the self-guided audio tour that we were enjoying so far.

We proceeded on our own along the loop road and stopped at the Balcarres Redoubt location, to make the half mile walk around the grounds where the British had retreated after some of the first fighting hadn’t gone their way. We kept our helmets on for the short hike, to be able to listen to the audio guide, and must have looked like odd ducks to the few other visitors we saw enjoying the grounds. We did doff our jackets in the day’s increasing heat, however…

It was a nice slow stroll around the sights, reading the signs and imagining the layout of troops. It was at this point that the recollections of this trip report may diverge a bit.

Some may state unequivocally that via some mysterious rift in the space-time continuum, a squad of elite British rangers took up positions against us and began firing against the strangely-clad intruders. Char threw her arms up to protect me and took a musket ball along the forearm as proof of her bravery…

Others might simply note that the path pavement was nice and flat…until it wasn’t, when Char managed to stub her motorcycle boot in the one pothole we encountered, taking a small spill onto the asphalt. She ended up with some scrapes on her forearm, creating a bit of a bloody sight for when Lisa and Bob came riding in. I was digging out my first aid kit, and Lisa got a bit excited (being a nurse) about having a patient to treat and got hers out as well. Between us, we got Char’s wound cleaned up and properly bandaged for the ride home.

Pride stinging, but thankfully otherwise unaffected, Char was game to finish out our tour. We took another CAREFUL walk at the Breymann Redoubt and visited the “boot monument” marker, near the spot where General Arnold was severely wounded in the leg during a heroic charge to rout the redcoats. Arnold’s name is not mentioned anywhere on the monument, in light of his later treasonous actions.

Back at the parking lot, we spotted this cool bicycle repair stand provided by the park for visitors. It included an integrated air pump and several tools on chains that could be used by cyclists experiencing issues on their way along the loop road. Interesting concept, though probably only useful if you happened to break down at this exact moment of your ride.

We continued onward to the site of the main British encampment and General Burgoyne’s field headquarters. These are now open grasslands marking what were once active farm fields, and we imagined hundreds of small tents and thousands of men spread out in front of us, waiting and preparing for battle.

The last stop we made at the Great Redoubt provided the best views of the tour, high on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River and floodplains a couple hundred feet below us. Those plains are where the British both arrived from and retreated following their defeat at the hands of the Americans. US-4 was well hidden by the treeline, preserving the illusion of the historical landscape.

The final stop at the Frasier burial site required a longer walk than we were willing or had time to make in our MC boots, so we ended our tour and rode out of the park to continue on our chosen route. I hadn’t really known much about the battles of Saratoga before this visit, besides a few sentences referencing them in my high school history books. I find that I enjoy and appreciate such history much more as an adult, with more life experiences behind me to help connect the dots. There is no substitute for seeing real artifacts and being physically present at the site of important events in our nation’s past.

We crossed the Hudson for the final time at Stillwater and rode south on peaceful back roads and small state highways. We skirted the Tomhannock Reservoir and passed through Poestenkill before stopping for a late lunch at the Towne Tavern in Sand Lake NY.

This little gem of a restaurant has some nice outdoor deck seating alongside the babbling brook that runs next door. Service was friendly and efficient. Most of the menu options looked good, but I opted for salad after all the splurging the past few days. This is my first ride through this particular corner of NY state. I’d definitely like to return here to sample more of the food and ride more of the local roads.

Feeling refreshed after our meal, we zig-zagged the remaining miles down to I-90, then sped back east across Massachusetts. Fearing typically Sunday backups at the I-84 interchange, we made the decision to exit at Palmer and follow US-20 to MA 131, through Sturbridge, Southbridge and then Webster to cut the corner to Route 146 and thence home.

Another great NER trip was in our memory banks, with great riding, laughs and even some educational history this time around. It was the sort of relaxing long weekend we had both needed and provided some miles in the saddle together to prepare for the upcoming VOID rally in October.