Waking up and looking out the window, the 1-3 inches of predicted overnight snow was already gone as the roadway was clear and the sun was shining. Regardless of that though, we were going to stick with the decision to take the secondary NY-56 instead of the tertiary NY-458.

It's funny because Isy and I had just driven this random NY-56 road eleven months earlier. Today would be round #2, and not the day I see the bustling metropolis of St. Regis Falls via NY-458, haha.

We only had a 90-minute drive today, so the stops were limited to Saranac Lake where there was a store that Yaz liked. While in Saranac Lake, we passed right by an ice castle that Yaz wanted to check it out, while it wasn't really my thing.

Not that I cared that we stopped at the ice castle, but I've also since learned that it's a bit silly to not care about ice castles? I've told about five people about this and all of them have been blown away that I didn't lose my mind over said ice castle.

I took a grand total of two pictures. I thought it was fine enough? Sorry everyone!

Our destination today was Potsdam, a town of 14000 where 8000 of the population are students. Located a little over 25km (~15mi) from the St. Lawrence River and a 45 minute drive south of Cornwall, I really enjoy the nearby cities of Ogdensburg, Plattsburgh, and Malone up here in utmost upstate New York, which meant my hopes were high for Potsdam.

After grabbing our motel and going into some super random building at the college to get a parking pass for the game later, we then went for a walk around town on this glorious, peaceful winter's day.

Potsdam was a little small for my tastes, but at the same time, it seemed like we couldn't make a bad choice when it came to turning down streets and finding yet another intriguing building. A lot of this has to do with the sandstone used as a primary building material here; sandstone that came from many quarries along Potsdam's Raquette River.

The above Trinity Episcopal Church was built in 1835 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Walking back downtown, we came across the impressive Theta Phi Alpha Sorority house at 30 Elm Street, built in 1837. Sadly it seems like it's now for rent according to the 2021 StreetView, as the sorority must've not been able to keep up with rent or repairs or both.

Up the street a couple more addresses was their city hall, which also used to be an awesome fraternity/sorority house, but the city bought it and tore it down for a suburban strip mall library-looking ass city hall.

Walking along the Potsdam main strip, I was impressed with a gastropub called Maxfields due to its sandstone building (shocker) and the elaborate bar inside.

Stopping in for a drink before the game, 1888 adorned the top of the facade, and overall Maxfields was pretty good although a bit on the fancier side.

Tonight I was going to add to my obscure college hockey resume as we weren't about to see a conventional team like Michigan, Princeton or Harvard.

My college hockey journey was going to continue with Division III SUNY-Potsdam, as Yaz has a goal to see all of the State University of New York (SUNY) ice hockey programs in their home rinks.

This was getting into the smaller end of rinks I'm going to be interested in, especially when it wasn't that old of a rink. The thing was that I sort of liked Potsdam though, even as it was a shiny new rink with a wide concourse up top.

Turns out this arena was actually built in 1972, but it underwent an extensive renovation in 2012-13. There's only two pre-renovation pictures, but the rest of the renovation is documented quite well here.

Tonight's game involved the women's SUNY-Potsdam Bears taking on the SUNY-Canton Kangaroos. It was a spirited bout, but it seemed like the visiting Kangaroos were just the better team, even though this win meant the Kangaroos season ended at 8-15-1, while Potsdam's ended at 10-23-2.

The next day there was a gap in the college hockey schedule and that meant setting off for the four-hour drive to Peterborough, in order to check out some OHL action.

With there already being one hockey-free day on this trip, we couldn't accept another.

Crossing over to Canada at Ogdensburg-Prescott, we turned south and only a few minutes later we were at our first stop of the day: the Windmill Point Lighthouse.

It's here in 1837, that Upper Canadian refugees who had fled to America and formed a group of patriots, tried to come back and start rebellions and offensives into Canada at the nearby town of Prescott. Failing there, they went upstream to the tiny village of Newport, where they found this grist windmill that conveniently made for a suitable fortified tower.

The British, the Navy, and various militias would come for the patriots, and after a second attack, the Hunter Patriots were rounded up and either executed in Kingston, sent to Australia, or deported back to where they came from in Vermont.

The windmill then went back to grinding grain for the local residents, but eventually, following calls for there to be a lighthouse here at Windmill Point, the Canadian Department of Marine offered the abandoned windmill owner $600 for the structure and a right of way from the road. The appeal of acquiring the windmill and converting it into a lighthouse came from the assessment of it being "a very strong and substantial building", according to the 6th Annual Report of the Department of Fisheries (1873).

Nowadays this is a National Historic Site known as the Battle of the Windmill NHS and you've been able to go up in the tower and look out over the St. Lawrence since 1996 (provided you come during the tourist season and not in February, lol).

We needed lunch somewhere and Belleville was a good stop as Yaz would appreciate the Belleville Memorial Arena, built in 1929.

Parking nearby, we both took a wide route in order to capture all of Belleville's outstanding city hall, flanked in front by the first floor facade of the old Bogart-Carman Building (which most say collapsed, but the Belleville Community Archives says was demolished).

The old arena is located right behind city hall, in that beautiful way we used to do things where we'd shoehorn sporting grounds into the city and create a built environment (as opposed to simply paving over more wetlands on the edge of town).

We wouldn't get inside Belleville Memorial Arena today, but the future looks somewhat bright as a developer have plans to convert this space into a market with residential units. The only problem is that just a few months ago they discovered contamination that would hinder residential units, so now they're trying to go forward with a boutique hotel and a market.

Let's hope they're not just delaying until some realtor lightning or teenager firebugs come along. As we stood out front today though, it was sealed up well and looked maintained. There are certainly groups hoping for a favourable outcome.

Yaz said we should call up the realtor posted on the door and ask if we could get a tour, but I had my doubts that would work, so instead it was time for lunch.

And lunch was exceptional at the Bourbon Street Pizza Company, next door to the arena.

Ninety minutes from Belleville and we found ourselves in Peterborough, where we went straight to the Peterborough Memorial Centre for exteriors before the sun got too low in the sky.

I also wanted Yaz to check out the ruin garden of the old Peterborough jail, but along the way we noticed this hole where a church once stood.

I find it interesting that you can see from Google StreetView that this church was completely intact when Steve, Donnie, and I came here back in December of 2017.

I'm pretty sure the two of us were having similar thoughts of slipping past the construction fence, but the adjacent church hall was still in use as the local homeless shelter. Throughout taking pictures, men would come and go quite often, leaving us without any window to clamber inside.

I was really happy to see that the back rotunda of the church being preserved, except that wasn't the case. It was only still standing because the local developer who bought the 1859 building decided to demolish the church in stages.

It was only in writing this update that I saw the September 2021 StreetView where the church is entirely gone. The developer was simply waiting until February 2020 for users of the rotunda to finish up.

Quite a loss.

Heading to the hockey game, I was now with a slightly different crowd than the time I came here with Donnie & Steve, where Yaz absolutely wanted to check out the Peterborough & District Sports Hall of Fame located right in the arena.

I'd read a few reviews of Peterborough's arena that said this museum is impressive and they were completely right. I couldn't believe how much memorabilia, information, and history they had on display.

I'm not about to go into detail on this arena again when I already did that back in 2017.

In the meantime, the only change was Peterborough's plans to replace this arena seem to have stalled. They were forced to replace the arena floor and they tore down an old community rink to build a new two-sheet arena, but nothing recent has been posted regarding replacing the fantastic Memorial Centre.

One of the things that soured this trip to the PMC slightly was during warmups, when Yaz and I were set up and taking pictures of all the star players in this game. Almost immediately, one of the ushers came over and told us know we couldn't use our "fancy" cameras.

It's really starting to get ridiculous with how poorly my camera performs in low light at capturing moving athletes, versus something like the iPhone 14 that everyone else has nowadays. Whatever though. It's not like I knew who Akil Thomas was anyway. The crummy thing was that Yaz was more annoyed by this development and asked the guy what the actual policy was, but the usher just repeated that we couldn't use our cameras.

As it turns out, the usher came back during the first period and told us he had talked to someone else and he was wrong. Yaz was still annoyed he missed his warmup photos.

One improvement the PMC made since 2017 was that it was no longer poutine-free!

Except for when I asked for a poutine, they said they couldn't do it because they were out of gravy, LOL. Instead I got a smoked sausage that was fine.

As for the game, Toronto Maple Leaf prospect Nick Robertson scored his 47th goal of the year, but it wasn't nearly enough as the Hamilton Bulldogs took the game by a score of 3-1, punctuated by a Jan Mysak empty-netter.

We simply went back to Robyn's Motel after the game, allowing us to get up early and get after it the next day.

Continue to Part 3...