Off to Weedsport We Go

Cornfields are swishing by. The sky is a beautiful blue puffed with bright clouds. Train tracks race beside our car as the kids are engrossed in activities within the car. It is a calm scene that lasts all of three minutes before someone has dropped a cup, cracker toughs need refilling, a baby has pooped.

Eeeek! Eeeek! Eeeek!

This is the emergency broadcast system. We interrupt this blog post to inform you that the car is at a level orange security alert.

Eeeek! Eeeek! Eeeek!

Diaper change. Fail. Yogurt. Fail. Singing. Fail. Blanket, paci, headrub. Fail, fail, double fail. Ora-gel. Affirmative!

Did I mention teething?

Over and through the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, our ten-hour journey heads north: through the Eastern Shore, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and finally Weedsport, NY. Never heard of Weedsport, you say? It’s up in a tiny quaint pocket of New York in the County of Cayuga – population 1,815.

Americana at its best with rolling hills, sleepy cows, blueberry patches and oh, the best Great-grandma three Mini Macks could ever have. The kind of Great-Grandma that wakes up early to make monkey bread casseroles (cinnamon and sugar, not real monkeys – they asked.) The kind that thinks steps ahead like a skilled chess player in hopes that all runs smoothly for a sweet visits of puddle jumping, music on the lawn, and adventures with great-cousins, uncles, and aunts. Because this is a place where all the people we meet have a title of “great” before their names. It’s family and we are thrilled to be in the fold this weekend.

 I would like to introduce you to Great Uncle Andy. Imagine sitting at breakfast with It’s a Wonderful LIfe’s Jimmy Stewart.* Exact same voice and demeanor. Picturing it? Here we go..

Breakfast Q&A with Great Uncle Andy
Where are we?
As far as longitude and latitude – I don’t know.

What happens in Weedsport – why is it so great?
Location. A small town on the throughway. The village is a sleeping town where you can work somewhere else and live here. It separates the country living from the city living so you can still go Syracuse or Rochester but still come home to small town.

Why is small town living special?
Depends who you are. If you don’t know any better…

Then we shouldn’t fault you for your mistake?
[laughs]

5 top reasons to visit Weedsport?
Now you are pushing it…[laughs]
Our schools are top in the nation. We have four seasons of sports with plenty of fresh water. You don’t have to be a sports fanatic to enjoy the beauty of the seasons.

Your favorite location you can get to within a day?
Any of the Finger Lakes. Adirondacks, its a preserved park that is thousands of acres in the spectacular wildlife – trees and mountains.

 

Best to place to eat?
Home.

Would you live anywhere else?
If I had the money to? No. I would vacation elsewhere. But to live? No. Assuming you can afford to heat your home and everything else that goes along with winters, I would be hard pressed to live somewhere else to ‘live-live’ that offers everything you need as far as water, fuel, and cost of living is good.  But that wouldn’t keep me from Alaska, New York City, or Mississippi to visit on vacation. But there are always reasons to come back. Family.

Wait, did you say Mississippi? Vacationing?
That is a part of the world – Tennessee, Kentucky – places I’d like to get the culture, to see the differences between 5^th Ave and the Bayou.

 

Nuclear plant? What do you do there?
I am an Instrument and Control Technician.

Do you like it?
[hesitates] All in all, yeah. There are downsides to working at a nuclear plant.  Limitations on federal… You can’t just go out and do what you think is right, its controlled with laws. Let’s say I was in landscaping business or an artist or anything like that. You can’t just go out and do it the way you want to do it, you are tied to certain specifications.

Why?
Public safety. You are working at a massive reactor core that has more power than the sun. It’s respecting nuclear power. It’s a huge amount of energy to contain and if you don’t you die – along with thousands of other people. It’s not like working at home – if you want to cut the lawn at home it would take you this amount of time. But if you try to do the same at work, for example, it would take much longer because of all the regulations and requirements. You have a ton of safety procedures involved. You don’t just go out and do “stuff”. And rightfully so.

In three points, what is it that you do?
Calibration of reactor instruments
Perform function procedures
Maintain safeguards

All in all this if for the purpose of what?
Make electricity. Our power is delivered to areas over the northeast of the USA. It gets transmitted to Ohio, Pennsylvania… You are limited to how far you can send electricity efficiently or else we would likely go further.

What are the obstacles with efficiency?
The efficiency of sending electricity over electric wires – your efficiency drops over so many feet of wires. They talk about zero degree wires in order to be better conductors, but that hasn’t happened yet. You have power losses on your grid.

 

Where do the power losses come from?
Inefficient wiring. Cable size. “Line loss”. Think of it this way, it would be ideal to have nuclear power plants in the middle of nowhere, but we can’t. This is why the majority are near densely populated areas. Electricity is carried over wires and you can’t efficiently wire from the middle of nowhere to a city. We service Syracuse, which is 30 miles away.

 

What would be the best improvement for nuclear power?
Make every plant the same. In the ‘60s there was so many different kinds. Reactors were built 15 different ways – A standardized power plant and nuclear waste storage.

Nuclear waste?
It lasts forever and is constantly giving off radiation. So it has to be contained in water or behind concrete in order to contain radiation. No wants their cells mutated.

 

How many plants like yours are there in the nation?
A hundred or so in the nation.

 

Any closing comments?
Stay out of my village (laughs). Come pay taxes. I wonder what that Duncan Donuts pays for taxes every year…

Picture locations:
1. Taughannock falls and Cayuga lake with our very own Man in the Yellow Hat played by Great Uncle Andy and Curious George played by Pig
2. Cayuga Nature Center with its six story tree house
*Fun fact via The Greatest Aunt Wendy (and wife extraordinaire of Uncle Andy) – Seneca falls was rumored to be the inspiration for Bedford Falls, the town in It’s a Wonderful Life.