I’ve heard it’s possible that sometimes everything goes according to plan. I say bullshit. We made plenty of plans, big ones, too big even — exploring Albany, Memphis and Chicago in one crazy jet-setting weekend, taking advantage of some deeply discounted Southwest tickets. I was ready to give just about anything a try, I had a chance to meet up with a real explorer, and one coming all the way from England no less, so I aimed to impress, as much as I could at my level anyway, and went along as the plans got bigger and bolder.
The trip could hardly have gotten off to a more inauspicious start. Still half (or more) drunk from overdoing it hashing the night before, dumbass me set my alarm for when the train was supposed to leave, without setting aside any time to get to the station. I hauled ass as fast as I could there, got to the station 25 minutes late, and somehow managed to catch the train that was 26 minutes late. About halfway between Utica and Amsterdam the sun came up and I wanted to get some pictures of the foggy morning, and my camera would not turn on! I thought it might be the battery and plugged it in…still nothing happened! So I googled away frantically for any possible resets, and nothing seemed to work. Defeated, an explorer with no camera, I wandered over to a park and contemplated taking the thing apart, and eventually settled for whacking it against a park bench a few times in case the old sledgehammer fix might do the trick. It didn’t.
Eventually Ben’s train came in, and we decided to walk to the nearest place that we might be able to get a camera, which took much longer than we expected, and all straight uphill to get there, on a surprisingly hot September afternoon, but I spent more than I would have liked and bought a point-and-shoot to at least get something out of the weekend, it seemed stupid not to with how much traveling I’d be doing!
We found our way from there to the Mohasco Power Plant, near but not quite on a massive mill complex currently being demolished. I was afraid to try, admittedly, with the workers being what seemed like so close, but there was a river in between, so I was convinced into going for it.
And it was everything I could have hoped for: rusty, crusty, greasy 19th century industrial steel!
Even the point and shoot was much less of a disappointment than I would have expected.
And it seemed at last we were on our way, we could pull it off and this would be the epic adventure we’d been dreaming of all summer…