entering the Empire State

In the first leg of my Loop Eastward, I just now plopped down in a hotel in Amherst, NY. I was thinking "hmm, Buffalo... a good place to stop off on the way to Nashua" but I really didn't do any research about a place to sleep. I used the old "wander around until you find a hotel" technique. Not the most direct of techniques, especially when you arrive in town at 10:30 at night and have a tendency to indulge yourself with satisfying the "hey, I wonder what's down this street..." urge.

After passing the downtown and Peace Bridge (to Canada) exits, I turned off in the Black Rock neighborhood, and, no offense to residents of Black Rock, but they could really use some more streetlights. I was tempted, butdidn't do the in-a-strange-neighborhood-potentially-lost-late-at-night-lock-the-doors thing because, honestly, I would have felt like an idiot. Especially so because I rant all the time about how the scared white people make up bullshit about poorer neighborhoods (I don't know if Black Rock is considered "poor" or not, and I mean no disrespect, but the streets I drove on could use more than a little work) . Regardless, there weren't any hotels after about 10 minutes of roaming, so I got back on the highway, took 290 around the city, hopped off on Niagra Falls Rd, and here I am.

I kinda wish I had gotten into town earlier - I do enjoy sampling local brewpubs, but it's a little late tonight if I'm going to get to Nashua by Wednesday night. Probably should have left on Monday. ah, well.

Local attractions? How about largest urban park/parkway system in the country, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, one of the founders (or maybe The Founder) of Landscape Architecture at the turn of the century, designer of tons and tons of parks and university campuses and city plans. Olmstead also featured in The Devil in the White City (a fine book about the 1893 Columbian Exposition, which I recommend reading).
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This, of course, leads me to a rant.... something that I've been puzzling over for a while - the Ann Arbor Greenway debate that has been going on for so long. I haven't paid it much attention over the years, but I recently saw a poster in the Ann Arbor library. And there's all this hullabuloo over what is, realistically, a few small park spaces in/near downtown Ann Arbor. I just don't understand why there's so much debate...
a) The parks are planned to be conversions of existing city property, so there's no need to exercise Eminent Domain or annex township land or anything offensive to property owners.
b) Connecting them through downtown with a path will not significantly change downtown traffic - downtown traffic is already pooched - it can't get much worse.
c) Downtown business and real estate owners aren't going to give up their valuable real estate, so the pro-parks people can give up on getting more land than is currently available to the city.
d) We DON'T need more real estate in downtown Ann Arbor comitted to parking. More efficient parking though... turn a surface lot into a garage, for example. OR, make Main Street and State Street (including the surrounding blocks) into pedestrian zones (no cars), and enhance the roadways AROUND downtown to make a bypass loop so that motorized traffic can get around easier and non-motorized traffic has a safe place to be.
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But anyway, enough ranting about MI while I'm in NY... tomorrow I think I'll check out some of the parks and parkways in the Olmstead park system, see if I can get in to see the Frank Lloyd Wright house/complex in town, maybe go to a local brewpub for samples and lunch, and start the 6 hr. trek across the wide expanse of NY State. I'll confess though.. I really want to swing north to drive through the Adirondack Forest Preserve ... a 6 million acre collection of forest land, and notably, a big green blob on the map that takes up a whole lot of NY, and gets me wondering "hmm, what's there to see over there?"