Tempted by tales of black bears we headed back to the Adirondack Mountains, this time to the east side town of Old Forge. We also hoped we might see moose but when Andrew asked he got the standard NY response: “I’ve lived here for x years and I’ve never seen one”. In the end we just enjoyed the ambience and settled for a few deer.

Within upstate New York there are very different economies. Much of upstate New York has struggled to recover from the 2009 recession and its economy has been sluggish or stagnant ever since. There economic gap between upstate and downstate New York is widening and much of upstate New York’s population is dropping. We drove through towns where, for example, the median household income is less than $50k and about 6% of the population live below the poverty line.

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