All that changed when I arrived at Hamilton. The outing club made it easy to get up to the north woods, and by the Spring semester of my freshman year, I was spending almost every weekend exploring the same places that enchanted me years before. Days are spent hiking/climbing until my legs/arms feel like they are going to fall off, and nights are spent eating simple camp meals and sleeping in a tent, a far cry from the upscale restaurants of Lake Placid and the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Despite the sore, cut up hands and full-body fatigue that result from a full day of hiking or climbing, I always feel content and at peace with myself. Waking up to the rising sun and the sounds of songbirds beats just about any other way to start the day.
This weekend, I had yet another new experience: Sleeping and hanging out in Camp Winona and Litchfield Castle. I had never before experienced such a display of wealth and extravagance in the Adirondacks. The Litchfield Castle was in all honesty kind of unsettling to me, like a trip to the past. Winona blended in a little more with the surroundings, however it still felt strange to be in such a bastion of civilization in a place as wild as the Adirondacks. I feel like I now have a much greater perspective for the many different lifestyles of the Adirondacks from talking to people like the 16 year old trapper at the museum, Peter Litchfield and Dennis Phillips. Before this weekend, I had seen the Adirondacks strictly as a wilderness and a playground. Now I have better appreciation for the human aspect of the park.
I like your point here - going to a place you may be familiar with under different circumstances can be quite eye opening and expansive for your definition of a place. I definitely feel that Litchfield is a place many of us would probably never have sought to go in the first place (we probably couldn't have gotten in even if we wanted to tour without Janelle and Onno's connections) and it helps complicate our understanding of an Adirondack resident. I commonly kind of have this sentiment with my own hometown in Connecticut. Whenever I tell people that I am from there, I normally get rolled eyes and clichéd state stereotypes thrown right back at me from people who have lived in other places. With a little perspective of the residential side of a place a person normally passes through, you can find your assumptions completely off base or too simplistic.
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