Sept. 7, Donna

Yesterday our major activity was to spend the morning at the Corning Glass Museum. This museum really is a treat. It is housed in an impressive building made mainly of glass. There is an exhibit of spectacular glass artwork, along with an exhaustive display on the history of glass from all over the world. There’s also a theatre where we watched a demonstration of a glass maker creating a vase. As many times as I’ve seen this kind of demonstration, I continue to find it fascinating.

The Steuben factory is on the premises, so we watched the glass blowers and glass cutters for a little while. I searched in vain for a factory outlet store …. they did have one for Corelle, but not for Steuben!

The highlight was visiting the studio for the do-it-yourself glass lesson. Lenny made some wind chimes where he placed the pieces of colored glass on the clear glass to be fused later. Marina and I made blown glass. We actually got to do relatively little of the process other than select the colors, and blow into the tube. The glassmaker did pretty much everything else. I made a pumpkin, and Marina made a tear drop ornament. They have to cool for a day so we won’t get them until we are home.

After the museum, we strolled the streets of Corning with its many glass shops. We made a very productive stop at the Van Huesen factory outlet store, with its summer sale, where we picked up stuff for each of us, including some perfect shirts for Marina’s dress code.

We drove all afternoon to arrive at Cooperstown. We took an evening stroll to the lake and had dinner at the Otesaga Resort Hotel, a stately hotel looking out over the lake. (Marina kept asking why we weren’t staying there … I sort of wondered the same!).

-- Donna