Friday, June 28

The house on wheels rolled out of the KOA around 9 a.m. heading east towards the Finger Lakes area. While we originally planned to visit the area we felt that a lot of the cool stuff to see was on the south side of the lakes and that we would save it for our summer 2014 trip. We headed to Syracuse, where our first stop was Destiny USA...a mega mall that has 3 levels complete with an indoor rope climbing course, go kart track and of course every shop you could imagine. We spent a few hours wandering around and Jason of course bought a few more polos to add to his collection! Lunch was prepared and served in the parking lot before we headed to the campus of Syracuse University. Navigating a 31 foot motorhome on a college campus can be a challenge as we found out over spring break when we visited the beautiful campus of Duke. Syracuse offered narrow roads and steep inclines as the campus lays nestled in a very hilly region...add on the detour due to construction and we consider ourselves fortunate to have made it on and off campus with no major incidents. We found a large lot to park in right by the Carrier Dome, which is what we were hoping to visit. A short walk lead us to this monstrous building, and a little bit of luck landed us there on a day that a kid camp was being offered, so the facility was open for us to walk through. I don't think any of us realized the true magnitude of the dome. The Carrier Dome houses a wide variety athletic competitions including basketball, field hockey and football. The floor of the dome had 10 full-sized basketball courts set up on it for the camp! As we were walking around we came upon a diagram that shows how the facility is set up for basketball games—the single court is set up on the far end of the dome, and a set of portable bleachers is pulled up to the side of the court that is not surrounded by the permanent. The set up for the event only used up 1/3 of the entire facility...definitely not what you see when you watch it on TV. After the visit to Syracuse we made a quick stop at one of our favorite road trip destinations—Target! We pulled into the Old Forge Campground Resort around 6 pm, ate dinner and then rode our bikes into town to visit a few shops and take in the scenery. We rounded out the night with some showers and another round of our favorite, new game...buzzwords.