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Melissa L.Penfield Park
This is where I like to do my flying. There aren't many open spaces near Plattsburgh where you can actually fly a kite where you won't get arrested for tresspassing. You'd think with the huge amount of farmland around Dannemora, I could find a closer place to fly, but apparently farmers don't appreciate folks tromping through their fields to recover a downed kite. But the park is just a short hop from work or home, and sits on the north edge of town just behind Bailey Elementary School (the building complex at the bottom)
Ummm OK... So Why Kites Of All Things?
Like a lot of people, I've been playing with kites since I was a kid. My early childhood years were spent in Alamogordo, NM and San Bernadino, CA. Miles and miles of empty space, scrub brush, and sand dunes. Any time you drove near open space you were likely to see a kite of some sort in the air. The addiction started out in the normal way... with a series of cheap plastic drug store kites. These were guaranteed to offer hours of fun, and keep kids busy running at top speed towing what amounts to a bread wrapper on 10 feet of line, in a futile attempt to have it stay in the air. Later on, after we moved to Tupper Lake, NY, I did the boy scout thing for a year or two, and one of the projects was a home made paper bag kite, which was only marginally better than the cheap plastic ones. The only reason I give it that much credit is the satisfaction you get when you set it aflame after hours of scissor cramps, tweaking, adjusting, readjusting, and running around like an idiot trying to get something with the aerodynamics of a piece of plywood to fly.
For a long time after that, I simply abandoned the whole idea for a long time, and moved on to more complex and frustrating things... like boomerangs. OK, technically you could argue that they are about the same thing... a heavier than air object that you throw as hard as you can, and pray it flies for at least a few seconds. Besides, it's not 'cool' for a high school kid to stand in the middle of the school rec field looking like an idiot.
Now that I'm too old to give a rat's behind what other folks think, and I can afford something that I can successfully get in the air, I've gotten back into it.
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