Not long ago a friend called us for our opinion about something she had received in the mail.

She had been issued a violation for going through an E-Zpass lane, without an E-Zpass sticker, sometime last December at exit B-1 of the New York State Thruway. She pointed out that not only was she and her car at a party in Springfield on the day in question, but she had not been on the thruway in over a year. She told us she had called E-Zpass and was told she would be sent a copy of the photograph of her car as it undertook this indiscretion. She wondered what she should do as she did not feel she had been successful in correcting this obvious mistake on the part of E-Zpass.

We tried to assure her that she should not worry as we were fairly certain that when she received the photo, it would be obvious it was not her car and in all probability, not her license plate. We suspected that someone had transposed numbers and/or letters or that that the plate was not even a New York plate. And we were reasonably certain that she would not lose her car registration, as threatened in the letter she received, once the incident was given a second look.

We must admit that we hung up the telephone hoping that what we had told her was indeed true. And fortunately, that turned out to be the case. In fact, she never received a copy of the photograph, but instead a letter saying the violation had been dropped with no explanation given.

We are very glad that she did not simply pay the fine as it was obviously sent to her in error. And we certainly would hope that others would be as questioning of such things which do not seem right. Obviously, we do not live in a perfect world and mistakes happen. We are always relieved, of course, when those mistakes can be, and are, corrected.

Not long ago we were glancing through the January 2007 issue of New York Car & Travel, which we now seem to get as part of our AAA membership.

As we were going through the magazine we suddenly came upon a lovely, snowy picture which we instantly recognized as Schneider’s Bakery. We naturally assumed the accompanying article, "Sunday in the Country," would be about Cooperstown. We could not have been more wrong. We actually think the article, which has the subtitle "Take a leisurely jaunt to a hidden treasure nearby," was suggesting winter activities which could be perceived as being day trips from somewhere. Included were Windham and Hunter Mountains, the Captain Lawrence Brewing Company in Westchester County, the Sterling Forest Ski Center in Tuxedo, and Storm King Mountain which evidently leads somehow to West Point.

The article gave high marks to Hudson for its noted cultural and antiques area which is just a few miles north of Olana, Frederic Edwin Church’s 19th century Moorish castle just across the Hudson River from Catskill. Mention was also made of the Saugerties Lighthouse, Trivoli, Bard College, Red Hook, Dutchess County with its historic villages including Bedford, Pawling, Millerton and Hillsdale, Katonah’s Museum of Art, Kinderhook, Millbrook, Elmira College, featuring Mark Twain’s study, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Rockwell Museum of Western Art, the National Soaring Museum and the Finger Lakes.

Just as we were beginning to think that the only thing about Cooperstown related to the article was the picture of the bakery, we learned that "Northeast of the Tier is the Leatherstocking Region, centered at Cooperstown on Otsego Lake. Here the Farmers’ Musuem provides a hands-on experience of life in the 19th century, while just across the road is the Fenimore Art Museum with its fine collection of Native American art. The beloved Baseball Hall of Fame and the Glimmerglass Opera House are also found in Cooperstown." And while all of that is basically true, we must say that we found it interesting that of the four places mentioned for Cooperstown, only one of them, the Baseball Hall of Fame is actually open in the winter. Of course, the pictured bakery is also open in the winter, but that is a fact which seems to have escaped the scope of the article. Nonetheless, we are happy to add the article to our collection if for no other reason than we think the picture truly captures our fair village. [an error occurred while processing this directive]