Madison Pour House

This morning, a telephone post studded with hundred of nails caught my eye.

A man driving me to work chatted at me as we went the back roads to East Syracuse.

No real way I could ask him to stop and let me pop out and take a picture of the remarkable post at the corner of Fremont and Kirkville Roads.

The nails caught my attention, each one pounded in by a person putting up a sign, hoping for a free advertisement.

No sign appeared on the post today.

I wonder what people with only enough money to make a sign and buy nails to put it up will do when telephone poles become an item of the past.

We've started to bury telephone and power lines, protecting the lines against failure when the snow piles up high and the wind and ice take down telephone poles.

An iPhone doesn't require a telephone line.

When we unhook from the wall jack in our homes, we unhook from the telephone lines too.

Sunday, I rented a bicycle near the College of Saint Rose near Central Albany New York and I pedaled it past Washington Park and through the Lark Street restaurant district and by the Albany Museum of Art and History and hooked it up to a docking station across the street from the State Capitol of the State of New York.

My phone told me I had pedaled for two and a half miles, arriving at the capitol after twenty minutes, costing me two dollars and fifty cents.

Google kept track of the path, knowing that I had bicycled from Madison Tap Room to Wellington's Restaurant in the Renaissance Hotel.

Google asked me for a review of the tap room and I wrote a review of Wellington's after waiting fifteen minutes for so much as a glass of water.

I could write some glowing words about the tap room, where staff were frosting a cake before the time came for a going away party.

One of the wait staff has chosen to move along.

The bartender invited me to stay and enjoy a few free pulls from the firkin and a spread of food that the chef had cooked up.

I think I could write a good review of the tap room.

I loved sitting out in the beirgarten and a metal patio table, enjoying the foot traffic walking buy, moms pushing strollers, a woman with her grocery bags and couples walking to dinner at the Indian restaurant or the Mediterranean restaurant.

The biergarten had a fence made of old weathered wine and whiskey barrels, each topped with a pot of begonias, petunias and ferns.

A jolly good tap room made to look old fashioned where friends could sit around the tap with a pint and show off You Tube vidoes to one another.

I think this is what a futurist called years ago, "High Tech, High Touch".

I could have stayed at my table until the party for Adrianna began but the bicycle ride through Albany appealed to me more.

A historical marker across the street gave the past a say this Sunday.

Near here Mohawk and Hudson First Railroad chartered in the country, 1826, began its run Albany to Schenectady.

Clinton's Ditch, the Erie Canal, had opened for business in 1825, the year before the railroad began to run to Schenectady.

Almost a hundred years later, public leaders allowed the burial of great sections of the Erie Canal now that railroads and trucks could carry all the freight more economically.

I got on the bike and pedaled, begining my journey home to a house built in 1826.