It started to rain immediately after I gave up on that handrail to ledge in Rochester. Even though I'd already decided I was done, I had to laugh at this sign from the heavens.

Racing back over the bridges and through business plazas, I quickly threw my bike into the rental car trunk and headed north. It didn't take long to find empty highways with berms and trees blocking anything of interest. Cruising along this desolate and wet highway, this felt much more like early spring than yesterday's sunny day.

Going north would bring me to Lake Ontario (and some lighthouses) in about 30 minutes.

Driving on the highway almost right up to the first lighthouse, there was only a small lakeside lane before I found Braddock Point. Unfortunately for me, this light station is now a B&B and since I wasn't spending $249/night to stay here, I was left standing behind the front gate.

(Google comments indicate that you can call ahead and if the owners are there, they're happy to let you take some pictures without staying overnight. Yet again, I need to get better with my trip planning.)

Braddock Point Lighthouse looks strange today, but it was once a gorgeous, great Victorian lighthouse with next to no cottages or trees around.

Built in 1896, Braddock Pt Light could be seen for 14 mi (22km) and was the strongest light on Lake Ontario at the time. The interior staircase was salvaged from a similarly gorgeous lighthouse in Cleveland, after the Cleveland lighthouse suffered a fire in 1901.

Unfortunately, Braddock Point might've had the thick walls typical of Coast Guard construction, but it still wasn't enough to withstand the gales blowing upon these shores. This happened quite quickly too, as cracks appeared in the tower within just the first few years.

By the 1950s, the Coast Guard severed the top half of the lighthouse and exhibited a light from a nearby metal skeletal tower instead. Duck hunters then converted the forgotten tower into a duck blind, smashing out windows and allowing weather to damage the plaster interior. Local children thought the building was haunted & I'm sure teenagers came out here to drink and party as well.

Fortunately, a few years later the lighthouse was sold into private ownership and slowly but surely, three different owners have put in the work to restore Braddock Point. The Braddock Point B&B website says that the tower has been rebuilt (which wouldn't count as a lighthouse in my book), but that it's also "not completely original" - making it seem like they built the modern tower/viewpoint upon the base ruins of the old tower (which would count as a lighthouse in my book).

Just one house down, there was a sign for a right-of-way and a small lakeside park. This got me close enough that I can say I saw the lighthouse, and I guess I'm going to assume that they actually built upon some part of the original structure.

Just up the road I found a handsome lakeside village in Charlotte, New York - and here I found a lighthouse that definitely counts, the Genesee Lighthouse.

A remote, forested area back in 1792, settler William Hincher and his family set down roots and built a cabin here near the modern-day location of the Genesee Light. Following William's death in 1817, his wife Mehitable sold the land to the Lighthouse Board, who built this sandstone lighthouse in 1822, nearly 200 years ago. As the oldest American lighthouse on Lake Ontario, it's second to only Canada's Gibraltar Point Lighthouse on the Toronto Islands in terms of age.

As the first Fresnel lens in the world was installed at Cordouan Lighthouse in France in 1823, the Genesee Lighthouse is so old that it used 10 Argand oil lamps instead. It also originally had wooden stairs leading up to the lantern room, until they were eventually replaced, along with the old Argand lamps, during an 1852 renovation.

With new piers built along the Genesee River, the Coast Guard decided to decommission this lighthouse in only 1881; taking the lantern off and putting it on the west pier atop a new wooden structure.

As nothing more than a stone tower, the old Genesee Lighthouse decayed and was under threat of removal for much of the 20th century. There was a call to demolish the lighthouse to increase railway land here in 1965, but thankfully local Charlotte High School students rallied together to save the lighthouse through a letter writing campaign.

The Coast Guard finally decided to divest itself of the property in 1982 and by the 1983, the Charlotte Genesee Lighthouse Historical Society had formed and took control of the lighthouse. By 1984, local Edison Technical High School students built and helped install a new lantern room.

Today there are tours in the summer and fall, where you can go up in the lantern room for $3.

It can be fun sometimes to visit a lighthouse during inclement weather for authenticity or the feeling of how "it should be" at a lighthouse - but today's dreary weather felt like nothing but a disservice to such a great lighthouse. It wasn't nasty enough to feel like lighthouse weather, rather it was just dreary and dull.

I still appreciated the Genesee Lighthouse, but I'd like to come back one day in better (or worse) weather.

From Charlotte, just north of Rochester, it was about a 90 minute drive over to Syracuse and the location of tonight's hockey game between the Syracuse Crunch and Nikolay Goldobin's Utica Comets.

Seeing as it was still raining by the time I reached Syracuse, and the Bruins were playing an afternoon game, I did the unthinkable and after years of wanting to explore Syracuse again, I checked into my hotel and chilled out for the afternoon in my room.

The Crowne Plaza Hotel isn't typically my type of place, but it was downtown, at a decent price, and the only other options were expensive B&Bs.

Everything worked out great in the end, as my reservation comments asking for the highest floor on the city side, left me on the 17th or 18th floor, looking out over Syracuse and adjacent Onondaga Lake. Pulling up my room's rolling office chair to the picture window, I found the Bruins game on TV and was in heaven overlooking a fine American city while Pastrnak tried to slay the Senators.

Plus the Crowne Plaza had an abandoned church just across the street.

This is the People's AME Zion Church, the oldest African American Church still standing in Syracuse (built in 1910-11). I couldn't find any way inside, and it looks like that is probably the result of a local development corporation owning the building and hoping to soon turn it into a museum.

Eventually it was time to walk the 10 minutes over to Syracuse's arena. I left the Crowne Plaza with plenty of time before puck drop, as this was an arena extremely high on my must-see list: the Syracuse (or Onondaga County) War Memorial Arena.

The Onondaga County War Memorial was built from 1949 to 1951 and while many arenas of that age are called Memorial Coliseums or Memorial Gardens, I've never seen an arena that was so focused on the actual memorial part of their name. All along the outside, from benches to faux walls, were the names of various places of battle during the American wars that surely involved Onondaga County residents.

In the above picture, you can see Pork Chop Hill, Sunchon (North Korea) & Heartbreak Ridge on the benches (all from the Korean War); as well as Verdun, Somme and Belleau Woods from WWI. Walking around, obviously I had heard of Somme and Iwo Jima, but there were plenty of places that were unfamiliar.

Adding to the appeal and marvelous sight of this building is the choice of font here. A bold, sans serif, war time or almost Communist font, added to the stature of these memorials as I walked around.

In addition to the architectural features etched with battle locations, there was also a 100-ft long, 30-ft wide and 30-ft high ceiling Memorial Hall inside the arena. During construction, a survey was taken of Onondaga County residents and the 1500 names of men and women who died in WWI, WWII or the Korean War were inscribed in this hall.

In the time since the construction of the War Memorial Arena, all 62000 Onondaga County veterans have been researched and now there is an entire, lengthy wall listing their names.

You soon forget you're at a memorial arena almost everywhere else, but here in Syracuse, it was like attending a hockey game at a memorial square, legion hall or cenotaph. It really is a building built In Memory Of Our Service Veterans.

In addition to all of the interesting and educational war memorial sights, the age of the building was apparent as I wandered the narrow halls and past the tucked-in, tiny food stands.

I was loving this 1950s arena, but I couldn't help but think about how modern-day people must complain about this place. There have been calls to demolish the War Memorial Arena twice now, which thankfully have been met with renovations instead, but when you're not a lover of old arenas like me, the average person must get annoyed with long wait times and trying to squeeze by people in these halls.

That being said, tonight's game was a sellout of 5800 people & I didn't find the concourses to be overly congested. Of course they're not the vast plains of modern arena concourses, but it seemed like everyone was making do.

One of the things that helped with the concourse was how old school & hockey-loving the fans of Syracuse were. Barely anyone left their seat outside of the intermission, making sure they had their food and drinks beforehand & only getting up from their seat if absolutely necessary.

With such good attendance, I picked up one of the last tickets and I was hemmed right into my seat. When I needed to go to the washroom halfway through a period, I almost felt bad bothering people because there was so little movement outside of the intermissions (and the concourse/washroom was eerily silent when I did get away).

In addition to how great the arena was, attending a game here had value in that it was like time travelling back to hockey games of the 80s and 90s, where the concern and passion was towards the game, not the amenities of the arena or other modern distractions.

I can just see the owner of the Syracuse Crunch now, incredibly jealous of Detroit or Edmonton, where no one pays attention to the game and instead they hang out in the concourses buying overpriced food, beverages and goods.

Clearly they need a new rink in Syracuse as these people don't have any other option besides watching the actual hockey game. Gasp! How do they live like this!

I absolutely loved the War Memorial Arena & I'm really happy that my friend Yaz brought it to my attention. Thanks friend! (Check out his awesome pictures here.)

A 2018 renovation brought bathroom and lighting upgrades to the War Memorial, as well as a new scoreboard, videoboard, and new suites. All of these things that seem to be necessary to a modern-day arena, have now come to Syracuse and I hope that means the Crunch will now be here for a while.

I personally applaud their updates and can't wait to go back.

The next morning was Easter Sunday and next to nothing was open. This was good for riding my bike around empty downtown Syracuse, but it also meant eating at a Jimmy John's by Syracuse University.

Following breakfast, I had most of today to dawdle about before catching my evening flight out of Ottawa. I also knew that there wasn't much south of Ottawa that I wanted to see, so I went for a little, arbitrary detour to Oswego, grabbing a picture of the stunning Oswego County Courthouse.

There's a lighthouse to walk out to here in Oswego, but by the time I went for a spin around a half-demolished building in Fulton, and went down to Lake Ontario to scope out the lighthouse, I realized I was cutting it close in terms of catching my flight.

Therefore, about all I did in Oswego was shoot the county courthouse and wander a few streets, before driving the 3 hours up to Ottawa International Airport and heading back to NF.