Blue Line Creamery
2241 Saranac AvenueIce cream for dinner is a thing when you’re on vacation….right?
It was for B most of the week while we were in Lake Placid, NY for the Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships at The Olympic Center.
He had eaten at Emma’s Lake Placid Creamery a couple of times then he and J did the Ben & Jerry’s on the north end of downtown one night too.
Our last night in Lake Placid we found ourselves back in the hotel fairly early. I didn’t feel great and J and B were tired of sitting at the rink. L stayed downtown with her friends though. They went to dinner and got ice cream before heading back to The Olympic Center to get their stuff.
The previous nights, I had gone by myself to pick her up but this time, she had a lot of stuff. B still had his competitor badge so he was able to run in at the athlete’s entrance and help her carry bags out to the car.
He didn’t really want to leave the hotel….so we bribed him with ice cream.
We were kind of in a hurry to get back to the arena to get L and neither of us wanted to deal with the downtown crowds. We had been driving past a little walk up ice cream shop every day so I suggested we just stop there.
Blue Line Creamery is on Saranac Avenue at Nash Street on the west side of Lake Placid. The shop on the corner is part of a multi business building that is designed to fit in to the neighborhood around it. They look to have opened in the fall of last year. This spot was an ice cream joint in the past but it was called Mountain Mist Ice Cream which was an off shoot of a long time popular ice cream spot in nearby Saranac Lake.
Read more…Smoke Signals
2489 Main StreetI spent a pretty good chunk of our Wednesday in Lake Placid back in the hotel.
Wednesday was the day most of L’s skates happened at the Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships at The Olympic Center. She was done by about 2 PM. She medaled in both of her events so I stuck around the arena to see her get her medals then I asked J if I could go back to the hotel and take a nap.
The kids and J (and to be honest, me too) wanted to stick around and watch the Junior International Free Dance and Senior International Rhythm Dances. I was bummed because I was really curious to see how the Rhythm and Waltz was going to work this year but I know I’ll get many chances to see it over the next few months.
I took about a three hour nap and at about the time I woke up, I got a text messages from J asking if I’d come pick her and B up. They had watched the Senior rhythm and were ready to call it a night. The hotel was only a few minutes from The Olympic Center so I put on shoes and went and picked them.
We got back to the hotel and started talking about dinner. Neither of us really wanted to go sit down anywhere but we were both kind of hungry.
The thing we noticed, that neither of us realized, is that northern New York seems to be a hot bed for BBQ. There were several places in Lake Placid and several places we passed on the way from Watertown to Lake Placid that had BBQ. We decided to pick one that had online ordering then I was going to head out to grab it.
We picked Smoke Signals in kind of the middle of downtown Lake Placid on Main Street just north of Marcy Road. The restaurant is a two story building that kind of looks like an Alpine Lodge. The space used to be Alpine Mall with shops and smaller restaurants right on Mirror Lake. At some point before 2014, Smoke Signals took over the space but kept the Lodge motif on the exterior.
Read more…Bazzi’s Pizzeria
2536 Main StreetWednesday at the Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships was L’s day to skate. B was done for the week and he could just hang out with his friend from Florida he gets to see like once a year.
L’s schedule was somewhat compact for the day. Her first event was at 8 am and the last started around 1 PM. She surprised herself and podiumed in that first event so I hung around The Olympic Center for a while to see her get her medal.
I wasn’t really feeling very good so I kind of just kept to myself and sat in the stands during the break. There was other skating going on and it was nice and cool in the arena. It was surprisingly humid all week in Lake Placid and it could be uncomfortable outside.
I started to get hungry though and didn’t really want a burger from Roamers Cafe. I decided to venture out. There was still a pizza place not too far away that J and L had been raving about for the past year.
Bazzi’s Pizzeria is on Main Street on the south end of downtown Lake Placid across the street from the Golden Arrow Resort. The restaurant is one of several businesses on the main floor of a large three story brick building that has winter sports icons along the roofline. There are a few picnic tables out front and these were the tables we used earlier in the week when we got breakfast at Soulshine Bagel. The exterior has kind of a lodge feel to it which is on theme in the mountains.
Read more…Roamers Cafe & Bar
2634 Main StreetThe second day of the Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships was a pretty long one for us. B finished up the one event he started Monday night and he had both segments of his second event in the afternoon. L also had the first segment of one of her events and a practice for her third event.
J and L walked around at lunch time but I stayed and hung out at the arena. To be honest, I was curious to watch some of the younger ice dance pairs. My kids both do solo ice dance so I’ve never really seen how the younger kids do pairs patterns.
I didn’t really feel like walking anywhere for lunch when I got done with that. I walked out of the 1980 Rink and in to the main upstairs lobby area. I saw that the cafe was open and figured now was as good of a time as any to to grab a burger from there.
Roamers Cafe & Bar is inside The Olympic Center in downtown Lake Placid. It’s in the part of the building the connects the 1980 Herb Brooks Arena to the 1932 Jack Shea Arena. The main part of the cafe is kind of more like a concession stand it butts up to the 1980 rink. There are a couple of windows along the space that doubles as the kitchen. One of them is a pick up window while the one closest to the door that leads to the balcony outside is the order window.
Read more…Ere’s Pizza
2439 Main Street, Unit 3B and I left The Olympic Center in Lake Placid to get dinner after his first night of competition at the Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships but we ran in to a hiccup. The restaurant we were heading towards closed just as we were walking up the street.
He was fine with ice cream for dinner so I took him over Emma’s Lake Placid Creamery. He got ice cream and we headed back to the Olympic Center to watch some of his teammates in the Junior division.
I watched for a while but the longer I sat there, the hungrier I got. I didn’t want to go to a sit down restaurant that late because everything was pretty packed. B said he would actually eat a pizza but he didn’t want just one slice like L had been getting him from a slice place downtown (blog on that place coming soon).
There are quite a few pizza places near downtown Lake Placid but I only found one with the most important feature.
I will do almost anything to avoid calling in a pizza order. It happens occasionally but there was nothing that really jumped out as me as that made me want it bad enough to that. So the place with online ordering got my business.
Ere’s Pizza was that place. It’s located on Main Street kind of on the north end of downtown Lake Placid north of Hayes Street. The restaurant is mostly below street level. It shares a building with The Haus boutique hotel and Saratoga Olive Oil Company. The pizza restaurant is down is underneath the olive oil shop with it’s entrance leading out to a small green space and public band shell right on the edge of Mirror Lake. There are a couple of long balconies that run the length of the building for outdoor dining that make up part of the aesthetic of the building.
Read more…Emma’s Lake Placid Creamery
2507 Main StreetWhat’s a vacation without ice cream….right?
It’s kind of a nightly occurrence in a resort town Lake Placid.
We were in town for the Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships at The Olympic Center. We’re calling this “our vacation” this year because it was a family trip to a town that most people would vacation in. Yeah, we spent a lot of time at the rink but we also had a little bit of relaxing time outside of the historic venue.
The first kid to compete was B on Monday night. He only had the first half of his event. The second part of it was the next morning. Once he was done and changed, he wanted to go get something to eat then get back to watch some friends in the event that was happening after his.
He and I left The Olympic Center and started walking north to find someplace we could quickly grab a burger. There is a spot just a few blocks away but they were putting up the closing sign as we walked up…at 7 PM….in a resort town with literally hundreds of people walking the streets at night.
He didn’t want pizza again and any other place would have required us to sit down for a meal. He also wasn’t interested in that. He asked if he could just have ice cream for dinner. I figured what the hell. It is vacation, right?
We headed over to Emma’s Lake Placid Creamery on Main Street and Grace Way in downtown Lake Placid. This ice cream shop is absolutely the place to be on a summer night in downtown Lake Placid. It’s a retro 1950’s style ice cream shop that quite regularly has lines down the street waiting to get in. When we got there around 7:30 PM on Monday night, the line was two storefronts down Main Street but it moves pretty quickly so we got in line.
Read more…Soulshine Bagel
2526 Main StreetThere were several places in Lake Placid that J and L couldn’t want to bring “the boys” to but breakfast was the big one.
We were in Lake Placid for the week for the Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships at The Olympic Center. This year, it was a family trip. Last year, J and L decided to go kind of last minute. I couldn’t get the week of and they had just taken B to a competition in Dallas. He wasn’t going to do very well and since it was an expensive competition, they decided to leave him home with me.
This year, B is more than competitive, he’s one of the best skaters in his level in the country. L is too. I planned for a year to have the vacation time available so we all packed up and headed to the Adirondacks for the week.
Monday was the first day of competition but it didn’t start until 5 PM. L had a practice skate around 1 PM and we wanted to walk around downtown Lake Placid for a while.
When we got out of bed, L was kind of pushing us out the door of our hotel because she couldn’t wait to get to her favorite bagel place.
Soulshine Bagel is on Main Street in downtown Lake Placid. The small bagel shop is on the south end of downtown next to the Grand Adirondack Hotel. The shop is one of many businesses on the bottom floor of a three level building that spans about a half a block. Soulshine is in the spot furthest north and it’s a very narrow building that, like a lot of places in downtown Lake Placid, becomes very crowded very quickly.
Read more…Wyatt’s
2525 Main StreetLet’s get back to some actual restaurant blog posts, eh?
I still have a lot from our trip to Lake Placid so you aren’t safe from those yet but from here on out, it’s only going to be about food.
We were in Lake Placid for the Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships at The Olympic Center. The competition didn’t start until Monday evening but L had a practice Sunday night. She doesn’t usually do practice sessions at competitions but she wanted to get a couple of skates in at the higher elevation before she started her competition on Tuesday morning.
She was done around 6:00 PM and we were all starting to get hungry again. We hadn’t eaten since we had breakfast at a Friendly’s in Liverpool, NY near Syracuse around 10:00 AM.
None of us really wanted to sit in a restaurant and eat. We were kind of looking for something quick. Not only was the ice dance competition happening at The Olympic Center but the Lake Placid Summit Classic lacrosse tournament was happening at the same time at three different sites in the area. Over 200 teams were in the area which made downtown Lake Placid incredibly busy and drove up wait times at restaurants all throughout downtown.
J and L had an idea though. They found a place last year that they knew would be pretty quick and would have something for all of us to eat.
Wyatt’s is a unique little spot in the heart of downtown Lake Placid. The tex-mex restaurant is actually a walk up window inside the Alpine Mall which is part of the Golden Arrow Lakeside Resort. You can see a window in to the kitchen for the restaurant from Main Street but you actually have to go in to the mall to find the ordering location. It looks like maybe at one time you could go to the restaurant from the street but that’s not the case anymore.
Read more…The Olympic Center
2634 Main StreetThis is going to be a long one…and another one that’s pretty light on food.
As we have traveled around the Midwest and to other parts of the country over the last several years, I have been including the ice rinks we go to as part of this blog. It’s also not unusual for me to write posts about the stadiums we visit although those usually include information on concessions and what we eat.
We did eat at this arena but I’m going glance over it here and make it a separate blog posts a few posts down the line which I will then link back here when it’s done.
All of that lead up to tell you I’ve been able to cross one of my bucket list arenas off the list. It’s not biggest or fanciest but it does have a huge place in sports history and I’m so excited my kids got to skate there.
The Olympic Center in Lake Placid, NY is the centerpiece to both the 1932 and 1980 Winter Olympic Games that were held in the small upstate new village. The massive three rink ice complex was built in two stages. The original building was built for the 1932 games. The newer part of the arena was built for the 1980 games. The complex sits on the corner of Main Street and Cummings Road across from Lake Placid High School and the speed skating oval which is part of the complex (we’ll get to that). The main entrance to the building is through “Miracle Plaza” which is accessible off Main Street through a circle drive. It’s the first of many times you’ll see the word “Miracle” throughout the complex.
Read more…Olympic Jumping Complex
5486 Cascade RoadWe made it to Lake Placid.
We took a little family vacation/figure skating competition trip to Upstate New York last week. We went through Canada and stopped at Niagara Falls along the way as well as a great little brewery in downtown Niagara.
We could have made the entire trip in one day but it was much cheaper to get a hotel near Syracuse for Saturday night then drive the rest of the way on Sunday. The first time one of our kids stepped on the ice was in the evening on Sunday so we didn’t need to be there super early.
We got up Sunday morning and had breakfast at a Friendly’s in Liverpool, NY before continuing the drive north to Lake Placid. It was about a three hour drive with a little extra time built in for bathroom stops.
We got to town about 2:00 and J called our hotel to see if we could get in. We weren’t staying in one of the nice hotels downtown. J found an old roadside motel on the way in to town that was pretty cheap. It wasn’t the nicest looking in town and didn’t have the best amenities but many, did they have some comfortable beds. I don’t know if any of us had ever slept that well in a hotel for five nights before.
The hotel gave J the access code for the room and we moved our stuff in for the week. Once we were done with that, J and L really wanted to take B and I to one of the Olympic Legacy Sites that they loved last year.
The Olympic Jumping Complex is just south of the village of Lake Placid inside the Town of North Elba (Towns kind of function like Townships in Michigan. The Village of Lake Placid is within the Town of North Elba). The complex is on Cascade Road just north of River Road. I’ll get to it in a bit but you can see the ski jump tower for miles around it. It’s really, really hard to miss.
When you get to the complex, you come to a large parking lot that is used during events. Drive past that and head down to the lower parking lot. You’ll be in front of Intervales Base Lodge where you start your tour of the complex.
Read more…
SW Michigan Dining 