On the drive back from Thatcher Park we would head down route 85 through Slingerlands. There was a little shop named Toll Gate Ice Cream, that sold ice-cream and those stick candies of all flavors. I remember that place fondly for a couple reasons.  The obvious one is that sometimes we would stop and get ice cream. It had excellent handmade ice-cream  that you could point to sitting in the 5 gallon buckets, long before we’d ever heard of Ben & Jerry’s or Marble Slab. I liked their black raspberry.

What my dad and my brother and I really loved about the place was a story of our own invention about the surrounding buildings. I’ll give credit to my dad for it, although it could’ve been any of us. Tucked way back on the lot behind the ice-cream place, there was another building, almost hiding from the street. This was a little town, but the building back there always seemed like way more cars parked outside this little ice cream place than made sense. To “explain” why the crowd was there my dad hatched the theory that it must be a secret meeting place for Russian spies. None of us ever believed that; it was just a cool story that made us smile. But from that day forward, while we were getting into the car to leave Thatcher Park and head home, or sometimes even when we were making plans on a Saturday morning to go to Thatcher Park for part of the day, my dad could suggest in a cheesy Russian accent “we can drive by the secret base and look for Russians.“ 

Even if we didn’t stop for ice cream that day, it would be a cool moment that would break up the “long” half our drive out to the park or back. Google Maps says Toll Gate Ice Cream is closed, and the street view shows it overgrowing with ivy.