Room 101

Room 101 is not a very auspicious place to be put but actually the Courtyard Marriot in Ithaca is a very friendly place and Room 101 is very comfortable. Ithaca, NY is famous for vegetarian cookbooks, a defunct shotgun company and the truly famous University and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.  The bird people are…

Still raining

I thought of detouring to Niagara Falls but that would have been silly – it would have added too many miles and I have seen torrents of rain all day anyway.  When it hasn’t been raining hard it has been raining very hard. So not a bird-rich day – even though the Allegheny Mountains, through which…

A hard rain’s gonna fall

It’s raining here near Erie, Pennsylvania and the forecast is for rain for a week.  A week! But at least I have lucked out on where I’m staying – it’s ‘only’ a Travelodge but it’s got more facilities than the very cheap places where I have stayed most of the trip so far. It has a gym…

The day after…

Sometimes you have an observation and you don’t make the identification – and it niggles away at you until you solve it. I returned to Crane Creek early this morning.  After yesterday I was keen to have some more.  I wasn’t alone – the crowds were there too.  But the weather was dull and the…

Total birding

Today was a birding day – an excellent birding day. Yesterday evening I drove through the north Ohio landscape looking for a cheap motel.  I travelled parallel with Interstate 75 on smaller roads including Route 66 (though not that one) for a while.  It was like travelling through The Fens – the roads dead straight…