With heat advisories looming, we set off on our summer road trip. A stop, first, in Erie, Pennsylvania: a ride on a paddlewheel boat across the bay. A visit to Presque Isle, a skinny peninsula sheltering the bay from the waves of the great lake. Temperatures rose as we attempted a hike to the tip of the isle. On the sweltering sand, birders flocked to see a very lost, presumably very hot, ptarmigan. Tiny toads hopped across the beach from lakeshore nursery to inland pond.

We waded into Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, and then headed toward another gift of the glaciers, the long, thin Finger Lakes.

From Erie to Ithaca, the landscape presented rolling hills, pretty farms, and wooded slopes. Now the heatwave had us in its teeth. Even a dusk walk around the grounds of our Ithaca inn made us sweat.

While climate change intensifies every season, summer feels especially calamitous, from dangerous heat to the smoke of burning forests hanging over my backyard. But the week leading up to Independence Day is when Sergey’s employer shuts down, giving staff a week off without worries about missed meetings or accumulating emails. So, this was our vacation! Enjoy it we must—while avoiding heatstroke!

We managed one real hike in the Finger Lakes region, a carefully planned downhill walk through the famed Watkins Glen. Occasional drips from waterfalls provided relief as the gorge heated up. Beside the ravine, purple-flowering raspberry bushes bloomed. At home, I’ve been coaxing a flowering raspberry to grow. Reluctantly, it has offered some flowers—but here I saw what these shrubs look like in riotous good health, where Mother Nature planted them.

While we’d chosen the Finger Lakes for their natural beauty, the heat demanded indoor pastimes. Two afternoons were spent in the exhibits of the Corning Museum of Glass, admiring glass from antiquity through present day. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology offered another air-conditioned visual feast with its vast interactive mural of birds of the world.

Our last day brought us to the Cornell Botanic Garden and Arboretum, a landscape of venerable trees and rolling hills. A bridge across a pond brought us to a frolicsome flotilla of snapping and painted turtles, perhaps hoping we’d brought a tribute of lettuce. We concluded our tour of Ithaca at Gourdlandia, where a couple grows gourds and turns them into lamps and other artwork. 

After driving the 640 miles back to Indianapolis, I visited my wildlife garden, now over a year old. In my weeklong absence, the flowers had exploded in midsummer joy. Plants that stayed spindly and flowerless last year now bore towering blossoms.

My first stop is always the milkweed in hopes of finding monarch caterpillars. I found not caterpillars, but another bug drama: a bee, motionless, suspended upside-down. A closer look revealed the reason. The victim was clutched by a flower spider, camouflaged amidst the buds to nab unfortunate pollinators. 

As I stepped around the milkweed, more drama! A burst of motion near my feet. A tiny rabbit, the wildlife garden’s newest resident, quivered at me from under mistflower. While I often lament these herbivores’ appetite for my young plantings, even I cannot resist the furry charms of a baby bunny.