Sunday - Day 2 in Ithaca

We slept in on Sunday and I took a short drive to Smart Monkey Cafe (which has a drive through window) and bought our morning fair trade organic coffee. We hung out drinking coffee and watched CBS Sunday Morning before heading out to church. After parking the car, we had a couple of minutes to enjoy Cascadilla Gorge. St. Paul's United Methodist Church is my childhood church and the church I chose when my family first started worshiping. I love the music, the domed choir area with angels looking down, the beautiful stained glass window with Christ pictured at the door holding a lantern. Most of all, St. Paul's draws people from diverse backgrounds and ages who are warmly welcoming. It is a community of active disciples and I always feel at home. My childhood pastor and his wife have retired back to this church and it was a delight to see them.

Following church, it was off to the Ithaca Farmer's Market. The market is in a permanent wooden structure on the lake. In addition to produce, there are flowers, cheese, yogurt, meat and eggs for sale as well as cider, hard cider and local wine. Local artisans sell jewelry, cutting boards, pottery, soap and other high quality crafts. There are musicians scattered throughout providing folk music and it's not unusual to see children dancing. The farmer's market is a wondrous place! There are also numerous (mostly ethnic) vendors selling fresh cooked food.

For lunch, we had a Jolly Burger, made with quinoa and sweet potato. It was served on a whole grain roll with sprouts, pickles, sauteed onion, lettuce and tomato. I bought four to bring home for lunch this week. The people who worked there were so friendly and happy. In our afternoon at the farmer's market, we also sampled a spinach and cheese empanada and peppermint tea.

I stocked up on winter squash. They make great autumn decorations until I can get around to eating them. I also bought beautiful red chard and a bag of Liberty apples as well as caraway seed cheese and to make an apple chard quiche and cumin seed cheese that I will perhaps use in pumpkin quiche. I couldn't resist the basket of purple potatoes just 'cause I remember my beautiful birthday mashed potatoes. Would it be too weird to each purple potato soup? The farmers are so friendly and I enjoy learning about their farms and the food.

On the way back to the motel to change into our hiking clothes, we stopped at the Ithaca Beer Company for a tasting. They had a number of brews as well as Root Beer. It was the best root beer I’ve tasted and is made with cane sugar. We bought 2 growlers (64oz) of Ithaca Double IPA a specialty brew using all NY grown hops. We look forward to bringing our growlers back for a refill and in the meantime will bring one growler to Katie and Dave's Oktoberfest and will invite Bruce and Gina for dinner to share the other growler.

After changing into hiking clothes, our next stop was Taughannock Falls. There are two trails: the Gorge Trail is a flat path through the gorge to the base of the falls. It is less than a mile. We chose the rim trail with a steep incline and then a flat trail around the top of the gorge with spectacular views. There is a perfect look out spot to see the falls from the top of the gorge. The rim trail took us about an hour and a half all the way around. It is truly an awesomely beautiful example of God's creation.

After the hike (goodness, time flies!), we shower and rest for a bit (and I snacked on some Ithaca "art" Dark Chocolate). It was a little after 7:00 and I was starving. We figured the Moosewood on a Sunday night would be reasonable. We quickly discovered there was a 45 minute wait to be seated. Because I was starving and starting to get a bit irritable, we decided to have our Moosewood meal as Monday's lunch. There is no shortage of good food options in Ithaca and we walked over to Taste of Thai on the Commons. It seemed crowded but we felt good about only having to wait for 15 minutes to be seated. Unfortunately, I was really starving at this point and we had to wait almost an hour more to be served our food. We noticed that absolutely nobody had their food. . . it turned out the computers were down (were the computers cooking the food? I wondered). The manager was gracious (smart?) enough to give us a 10% discount. My spring rolls were crispy and tasty and the Panang tofu was really flavorful. I am happy I ordered a hot level of "one" (of 7) because it was extremely spicy. Once I got over the crabbiness of my hunger, I enjoyed the meal.

While we planned to go to the movies, we were kind of sleepy by 9:30 and ended up crashing around 10.