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On Saturday morning we woke to the predicted brisk temperature, and ate our brought-from-home breakfast.  Scott enjoyed his coffee.  We then proceeded to our Speeder, started it up, and waited for the mandatory NARCOA safety meeting.  That completed, we proceeded North with our group of 27 rail and hi-rail cars and about 60 people to Tupper Lake, with a lunch stop at Big Moose restaurant.

The weather and the scenery were great, as was the NEREX leadership in keeping people together and working with the railroad to work around their tourist trains and railbikes.  We ate sandwiches we had bought at WAWA on the ride up from Pennsylvania, and at two different points on the trip Scott had a chance to get out his DJI Mavic S drone and take pictures of our “train” of cars and trucks and the surrounding scenery.

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We pulled into Tupper Lake (about 80 miles) around 5:30PM with time to unpack our cars and put additional gas in.  Since we still had around a half a tank available, we added 1 ½ gallons of gas to the Speeder, and walked a short distance to the Lumberjack Inn restaurant that had been reserved by NEREX for everyone.  We had a filling meal and met some new friends – Cody and Sasha from the State College area.  They are pandemic newlyweds – Cody is a real Engineer on the North Shore Railroad, and Sasha is a Physical Therapist.  We had a great time swapping stories with them.

We then took our shuttle to the Tupper Lake Motel, found our rooms, and proceeded to check in.  Scott then discovered that the charger on his laptop had stopped working, and by the time he went to sleep it had used up its charge and died.  This started the dark period in his life of almost 48 hours without a computer – relying only on his phone and android tablet.