Travel Adventures in Upstate New York, Part 1

We're home from our latest travel adventure! It was actually two trips back-to-back. During the first portion, Steve and I spent nine fun-filled days exploring upstate New York. For the second part, Trevor and Jonna joined us for a 7-day cruise that took us to three cities in New England and two in Canada before we returned to New York City. 

Portion 1:

Portion 2: 

As always, we packed in lots of educational attractions, including museums, tours, historic sites, and more. We tried the local specialties and learned as much as we could about each place we visited. We had a fantastic time and I'm really excited to tell you all about it!

Because I blog about educational travel, I was given complimentary admission tickets and other benefits for some of the places we visited during our trip. A few places we went are free for everyone, while we paid full price for the rest. How much I paid has no bearing on my reviews. Everything I share is something that I recommend without hesitation. If you see any gaps in my narrative, it is because I didn't love that particular attraction, restaurant, or hotel enough to recommend it to you, regardless of how much I paid or didn't pay.

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Sacramento, California to Buffalo, New York

I hate layovers and will go out of my way to avoid them. Unfortunately, sometimes they are the only option to get where I want to go. Our best choice to get to Buffalo, New York from Northern California on Thursday, September 4 was to take a 4 hour 14 minute flight to Chicago, wait around for 3 hours, and then take a 1 hour 48 minute hour flight to Buffalo. 

The combined flight time of 6 hours 2 minutes took literally all day long. Steve and I left our house at 6:00 am (Pacific) and arrived at our hotel in Buffalo at 11:00 pm (Eastern). Ugh. I hate losing an entire day like that. However, I ended up putting the layover to good use, first by getting a lot of exercise. We had a gate change as soon as we landed, which meant 20 minutes of brisk walking to get to the new gate two terminals away. (O'Hare is large.) Once we got settled at the new gate, there was another gate change. You guessed it - a 20 minute walk back to the original gate. Sigh. 

I used the rest of the layover to deal with the schedule for the following day. I pre-plan every detail of our travel in order to fit in as many fun activities as possible and 99% of the time everything works out exactly as planned. This was the 1%. Just before boarding our plane in Sacramento, I got a call telling me the bus tour we'd be taking the next day would be starting at 3:00 pm instead of 1:00 pm as planned. By the time we landed in Chicago, there was a message that the boat tour that was supposed to run at 4:30 was canceled, so they'd put us on the 2:30 tour. We had 3:00 timed entry tickets for a museum. To clarify, this was the original afternoon schedule:

1:00-3:00 Bus tour

3:00-4:00 Timed museum tickets

4:30-6:00 Boat tour

And this was the current situation:

2:30-4:00 Boat tour

3:00-5:00 Bus tour

3:00-4:00 Timed museum tickets

Clearly, we could not be on a bus and a boat at the same time we were at a museum. I ended up calling all three places during our layover to see what my options were. I learned that, no matter what, we'd have to drop either the bus or the boat tour. I was able to change the museum tickets. We decided to drop the bus tour, which left us with time to fill when the boat tour ended. After another call, this is what that portion of my daily schedule looked like: 

If we hadn't had a layover, I wouldn't have been able to call the places to reschedule before they closed for the evening. So I guess the layover wasn't all bad. Of course, ideally there wouldn't have been changes to the schedule in the first place. 

We did a lot more in Buffalo that just these activities. Tomorrow I'll tell you all about the fun we had in the City of Good Neighbors.