It was unsafe, expensive, irresponsible, and – toward the end, as blood alcohol levels rose – illegal. Starting at the Spread Eagle, the orbit was always counterclockwise: the Elm Tree in Keene, the Handlebar in Lake Placid, the Dewdrop Inn in Saranac Lake, and then on to Tupper Lake. From there it was south through the bushes to Long Lake, east through thicker bushes to Blue Ridge, with a stop at every watering hole. (We passed en route the monument marking where it's supposed Vice-President Roosevelt was located at the moment President McKinley died. We occasionally stopped and saluted the monument profanely.) From Blue Ridge it was north through New Russia to the Little Tavern in Elizabethtown; and finally, over tortuous, bumpy Route 9N back to our home valley. As the soberest member of the party (always too cheap to drink much), I was routinely terrified by this last bit, as it was considered among our set a mark of driving expertise to negotiate 9N's ten miles in ten minutes. Only a very relaxed driver could do it in a 1957 Bel Air.

That was long ago, and all that merry band have gone to the Great Watering Hole in the Sky. Only the mountains, the bushes, and the memories remain. Route 9N over Spruce Hill has been straightened and repaved; its only dangers now are state troopers hunting speeders. Mother and I climbed up and over and coasted down the other side at the posted 55 miles an hour. Cresting the summit, we gazed at the snow-covered peaks of home spread out before us.

It was here in the valley of the East Branch of the Ausable River we began our married life, and here we occasionally still come on what I call our almost-annual anniversary trip. This year an old friend in California – my roommate in prep school, who was raised here – lent us his summer cottage for a couple of days. It was a chance to visit together some people and places from a former life; to get away from the incessant blare of CNN coverage of the election campaigns; to experience briefly the relaxed life of a village with no pretensions of becoming anything else; and to recall why in the end it was impossible for us to stay.

The weather gods smiled. The crossing of Lake Champlain was brilliant, with snowcapped mountains on both sides rising above still-green fields. The people in the valley smiled, too. A few remember us, I presume, as an almost destitute young couple living in a leaky, $10-a-month upstairs apartment, with a baby on the way, and driving a wildly incongruent Jaguar roadster. We left there one below-zero winter day for another life, found it, and have lived it for better or worse. But this is where it began, and if they'll sell us a lot in the cemetery, it's where it'll end.

We dined Thursday evening at the Spread Eagle, whose name and ambiance have changed. I once tended bar here, and Thursday nights were our busiest: the bar stools full, the jukebox playing nonstop, and the bumper pool table clicking incessantly through the racket. But not this Thursday. Very quiet. We went home to bed early.

Friday was the big adventure: Tupper Lake. We wouldn't be driving 150 miles around the Horn, but instead visiting the new Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks, called for short The Wild Center. We'd been wanting to see it; but last year spent our anniversary, Halloween, in Old Forge, and arrived at both the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake and the Wild Center to find them closed; winter schedules. Rats! This year we Googled to make sure.

Both museums are world-class, founded and supported by very generous lovers of the mountains. The Adirondack Museum focuses more on the human history of the region – logging, farming, recreation, and native crafts. Its collection of small boats can hold me there for most of a day. The Wild Center deals more with the natural history of the area, beginning with its emergence from the sea billions of years ago, through the Ice Ages, and up to modern times. There's a tank of "heritage brook trout," the native species that the first settlers here encountered. A large Atlantic salmon and I watched each other through the plate glass of his pool. Otters swooped through a large aquarium hunting tiny brown trout that the attendants toss in at feeding time. Kids with their noses pressed against the glass are the otters' favorites; they pause to look them in the face and occasionally hold up one of their toys for inspection.

A young woman docent brought out an American kestrel on a gloved hand and talked a bit about its habits and range. In the new theater we watched a film, "A Matter of Degrees," describing the almost unbelievable changes wrought upon the region during the Ice Ages by a fluctuation in average temperature of only nine degrees Fahrenheit.

We browsed the gift shop. Then a leisurely drive back to Lake Placid, quite a bit slower than our tours of half a century ago. We nodded to history with a drink at the Handlebar, whose current owners don't even remember its mustachioed founder. A bobsled racer, he always stuck a cigarette into his mouth at the start of each run. It burned to a stub by the time he finished, but in spite of our prayers, it never set his mustache on fire. Ah, the memories! Supper at an ersatz Bavarian restaurant, and back to the cottage at last. We fell asleep to the sound of the river bubbling past, just as it did when we were just kids wondering – as we still are – what's coming next?