Not so Hostel Corning

Travelblog2.24.2009

I am writing this from our room at Watson Homestead, Tuesday morning Feb 24. We are here as part of an Elderhostel learning program which is all about glass making. Our room is nice, clean, though the beds are small (I think they are double beds, we’re just used to lots of room) so we sleep separately.
One complaint is that we have a basement room and the stairs are long to get to the main floor, no elevator for moving your stuff in. Very little internet or cell signal, I have to go upstairs to the dinning hall to use those, as a rule. I would have changed the room but I need the exercise.
The meals are simple but substantial; we had meat loaf and baked potatoes and veggies and a salad last night. Watson supplies our lunch meal at Corning Glass.
After the orientation at Corning yesterday, we had classes in kiln working, furnace and flame working. Each class was an hour and a half long. The instructors are mostly under thirty years of age but are all very patient and helpful.
Betty and I are the youngsters of the Elderhostel group but they are all well-informed and interesting people. Several couples have done as many as thirty of these Elderhostel trips to different places.
I’m doing things with glass I either always wanted to do or wondered how to do. I ‘gathered’ glass from a furnace several times and cut it off the ‘punty’, a piece of ½ in stainless round bar used to take the molten glass from the furnace.
I made a bunch of big beads, mixing different colors of glass in flame working. I think I’ll made a necklace for my granddaughter for her birthday, and I made half a dozen small glass sculptures by mixing different colors of flat glass together to be melted in the kiln.
I knew I would like this course down here but never thought I would have so much fun or learn so much.

More later.