It Takes Two... or Maybe Even Three

Left to right, top to bottom, a flat circle (a.k.a. "time"); loose representations of our itineraries from 2012 and 2013; a Carls Jr. logo, a caduceus, some soft-serve ice cream, a small tornado, a deformed stone fruit, an atomic tooth, the samba, an IUD, some double dutch moves, a beehive, Saul Steinberg's portrait of Peter Lorre, and some kind of knot

It's not that we have never backtracked or repeated ourselves—e.g., our two trips to northeastern Oklahoma or our unending fascination with toxic sites—but the next stretch of our Greater Empire State tour looped around itself more than usual. West to Niagara Falls, south to Buffalo, west to Erie (as described); then back to Buffalo, back to Niagara Falls, and on to Toronto; then back once more through Niagara Falls and Buffalo. From a satellite view, this resembles a very badly constructed knot. But this stretch was filled with doublings and repetitions. To wit: 

We picked up Watson at the Buffalo airport—though not before circling the grounds twice, on the kindly advice of a member of the gendarmerie, who suggested that we not loiter near the baggage claim because... reasons. From there we hied ourselves downtown for a pretty informative and pleasant waterborne tour of the Buffalo River. The heart of this entailed going up (down?) the river, and then back down (up?) it again, though we did also go out (in?) to Lake Erie a bit as well before doubling back to the dock.

There's lots of this sort of thing on the Buffalo River, whatever direction you're headed.

After some so-so beer at Big Ditch Brewing Company (extending the earlier Erie Canal theme), we had our most costly doubling of the day, as we bought surge-priced tickets to the Buffalo Bisons Fourth of July game (though it was but 7/3)—for which we already had gotten tickets, some time back. This was thus easily the most expensive minor-league game we've ever been to, which made it all the sadder that it was dominated by unrelenting patriotic bombast. As usual, we left before the postgame festivities (the Buffalo Philharmonic playing nationalistic "hits," an excess of fireworks, etc.), with Rob declaring, "This makes me want to stop seeing baseball." Rob Manfred, take note.

We did salvage the night at Allen Burger Venture's remarkably congenial bar, even if we were the oldest people in the place by at least two decades.

A view of the Lewiston Dam complex's intake towers (described ante), as displayed at the Niagara Power Vista Visitor Center

Our duplications continued the next day when, following a subpar breakfast at Tim Horton's (what happened, Timmy?), we drove through seemingly endless fields of high-tension lines to stop in at the somewhat redundantly named Niagara Power Project Power Vista, where we saw the downstream output of the inputs we had (sort of) seen two days before. 

We spent a surprising amount of time here.

Power plants and the like sometimes make me think of Aristotle Onassis's plans in the 1970s for drilling oil on the New Hampshire coast—a possibility defeated in no small part by the activism of a politician whose name was worth repeating.

Onetime New Hampshire state representative Dudley Dudley

From there it was on to a moderately disappointing sculpture park before fleeing the country, on the occasion of its 242nd birthday. Once safely in Toronto, we stayed in an AirBnB operation downtown, access to which required entering, then leaving, then reentering the building's garage—too tedious to detail, but another doubling all the same. We went to two incarnations of Bar Hop, one excellent, one a bit less so, though the punishing late-night humidity had something to do with that. And we saw a positive horde of other baseball tourists from New York—not exactly evil twins, but certainly orange and a bit scary. When they chanted "Let's go, Mets," we could go along with it; when they shifted to "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" we started researching the lyrics to "O Canada."

Seven Line Army, surveying what they imagine to be their spoils. (In fairness, the Mets did go on to beat the Blue Jays, 6–3.)

We were heading back to the Buffalo area the next day, en route to the Auburn Doubledays—whose name alludes, I assume, not to the man who did not invent baseball but to those times where everything seems to happen twice.