Day 47: Hamburg to Canandaigua, NY

My Mom is awesome.

She baked a chocolate cream cheese pound cake with a separate container of chocolate pecan sauce and mailed in to the hotel. YUM! Such a great surprise, and my team mates will be very happy to see it (or what's left of it) on the SAG tomorrow. I've felt so well treated on this ride with the tasty care packages showing up regularly - Thanks again for all the written encouragement and support. I feel so lucky to have such wonderful friends.

I almost didn't get the cake. For whatever reason the hotel was not at home when it was delivered today, so it ended up at the post office across the street - which was closed when I got in. I rode over there and rang the bell and luckily someone came to the window anyway. Thought I'd have to bring out the tears, but the tale of woe and emphasising that my mother's care package was at stake was enough to get me my cake after hours.

It was a beautiful day - the dire predictions of rain were thankfully wrong. Hopefully they will continue to be wrong. New England is getting an incredibly wet summer and all the locals are complaining.

We had a great treat this morning with a visit to a great bicycle museum in Orchards Park, NY. Carl, the owner, has assembled an amazing collection of bicycles and related stuff that tells the story of how bicycling developed in the US - from the early bone shakers (prone to kill you when they fell forward and slammed you on your head) to the Ordinary which was manufactured here in America by Columbia Bicycle Company, to the efforts to build paved roads, to the safety bikes, to the first version of the modern bike with a chain and independently supported wheels. It was very interesting. All cyclists - you should go visit. But hurry, he's looking to sell his collection and retire. Some quick factoids:

1). Bicycling was so popular by the end of the 1800s that other products started using bicycles to try and enhance their products. Example: Bicycle playing cards added 2 jokers riding bikes and changed their name.
2). Bikes helped lead to the women's movement. Women started cycling in droves by the 1880s and that led to more independence in transportation and got rid of the corsets and long dresses for clothes that allowed movement.
3). The Wright brothers invented their first plane behind their bicycle shop.

I hope Carl can find a good buyer - the history of cycling is fascinating and pretty informative to how our modern transportation system got started.

Here is their website for the Pedaling History Bicycle Museum: www.pedalinghistory.com

One other thing that really struck me today as I rode through several towns founded in the mid to late 1700s is how dramatically the country aged as we've moved East. Towns today like Lima and East Bloomfield have very early houses, classic town squares and a very settled feeling. Farms here have long ago been divided into smaller plots, most with mature trees carefully dividing the boundaries. These towns have a sense of completeness ... While further west they feel as though they are still fluctuation with changing times. I was also thinking about how fast American explanation West happened - Western NY mid 1700s, Ohio town mid 1800s, Indiana 1860s, then the gold rushes and railroads and suddenly they were all the way to the pacific. Pretty amazing, actually considering it took over 100 years to get west of New York from the first colonies. And there is a different feeling in those places that have been around longer.

Tonight we walked down to the lake in Canandaigua - one of the finger lakes in and wine tasted at a state sponsored tasting room that featured flights of wine from around the state. That was a good experience, because they pulled some pretty good wines that I might actually buy.

I'm boycotting buffets now with a few others who cracked recently on the food front so we went to a pub boasting over 100 beers on tap for an outstanding burger and sweet potato fries. Yum.

Tomorrow we have a shorter ride - 69 miles - across the top of the finger lakes. Should be more interesting stuff to explore, and more of the beautiful and bike friendly countryside with rolling hills and gorgeous views we had today. Hopefully we won't be pedaling drowned rats.