Clayton NY–It’s all about the Family

How do we decide where we are heading next?  Well, sometimes it’s just in the name of the town. Like the little town of Clayton in the Thousand Islands area along the St Lawrence River that we stopped at last week.  Tom’s Mom was a Clayton. Actually, Tom’s Aunt, Vivian married Tom’s Dad’s brother, Frasier, which makes all the children of Aunt Vivian and Uncle Frasier his double first cousins.  Also, as it happens this was the weekend of the Clayton/Westerfield reunion in Pismo Beach, a reunion that has gone on for about 70 years that we missed this year.  So staying in Clayton just seemed right.

We checked into a Passport America and was disappointed in the attitude of the owners.  They were very clear they did not like Passport RV’ers.  I guess they have had some pretty rude people who expect 50% off on everything from firewood to electricity. We were given a spot in the “overflow” area about 10 feet from a busy road, but since we had the TV running all night it didn’t bother us.

We wanted to go to the Antique Wooden Boat Museum.  It was just wonderful. We had a very very interesting tour of the $1.500,000 house boat, La Duchesse. Built in 1906 for George Boldt and has been in continuous use ever since. 

We learned more about canoes than I ever thought there was to know about them.  I just thought all canoes looked about the same, but there are racing, courting, fishing and just plain rowing canoes.  They can be wood, plastic, fiberglass, and metal, but most displayed at this museum were wooden.

		Canoes VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

The museum was right on the St Lawrence river and it was just so beautiful to sit and watch the boats in the river, some of them big ocean liners and some small pleasure boats.

We closed the museum and drove to a recommended restaurant, Foxy’s, right on the river with an amazing view of the islands, large & small boats and the boats bringing diners to the restaurant. Tom had delicious scallops, I had shrimp scampi and of course we had Thousand Island dressing on our salads.  We arrived at Foxy's about 5:15 just after the museum closed and got the last window table. By the time we left there was not an empty table left.

		Dinner at Foxy’s VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

We pulled out the next day and drove 87 miles along the beautiful St Lawrence River Parkway to the Robert Moses State Park, NY.  It was a quick stop in Clayton, but we stayed 5 days at Moses, but more about that next time.