Day 49: Little Falls to Latham NY

We are in Revolutionary War territory.

Today's ride followed the Mohawk river though a valley in the Adirondacks east into Latham, a suburb of Albany.

The valley has been a hot spot in history as a major route between the Hudson River in Albany and the Great Lakes. Conflicts with the British in the Revolutionary war and the French Indian War and with the Mohawks and other tribes of the Iroquois Federation.

One random thing I learned I want to research more is that the Tuscarora Indians, who were originally in North Carolina near where I grew up and where my family was along the Pamlico river in North Carolina, have a reservation in New York and were active in the conflicts. There was a war with the Tuscaroras in the early 1700s and the colonists - included my family - fled to Garrison point to defend themselves which is about one half mile from the family homestead on the river. The colony government sent troops in to defeat the Tuscaroras. They must have moved north to this area of New York after that and joined the Iroquois federation. That must be a fascinating story.

There were signs lining the road pointing out where there were Inns, pubs, river crossings and homesteads of noteworthy folks. This area was hopping and a source of contention.

We passed a fortified farmhouse called Fort Klock that was not open that early but was the site of a revolutionary war battle. It was built of stone up to the second story and had rifle slots at it's base. It was built this way to defend against the tribes in the area who were opposing westward expansion.

We passed a shrine to an Indian woman who was elevated to sainthood which was pretty interesting and set near the site of a major Mohawk village that was excavated in the 1940s.

We passed Fort Johnson which was a large home owned by a Johnson who was a Torey during the Revolutionary war and had to flee to Canada after the British lost.

It was also fascinating to follow the Erie Canal and its expansions.

We followed a bike path alongside the River and saw the locks at work as well as the dry locks from the original canal. The original hand dug canal was ultimately replaced by using existing waterways like the Mohawk instead.

It all made me more interested to learn more about the history of this area. And maybe come back for a couple of weeks to ride through the northeast and Eastern Canada ...

We were in a gentle part of the Adirondacks and they rose on either side of the valley in mottled greens and gentle rolling slopes. Wildflowers were everywhere. It was a beautiful day.

But best today was meeting up with my friend Zoe who was a roommate in Washington, DC and her husband Dale and unbelievably cute son Owen. They met me beside the bike trail with a picnic. Hans joined us for a tasty lunch complete with homemade oatmeal muffins that Owen helped make and cheese brought back from Ireland.

Then I walked back with Zoe for a tour of her neighborhood and house. She's in Schenectady which was a Dutch outpost in the late 1600s. The first settlement was attacked and massacred - their house was built in the stockade of the rebuilt community in the early 1700s. It's very cool - huge old board floors in the old part of the house that tilt and slant with age, a rock basement wall - no mortar, beautiful woodwork. And very homey and livable despite being a home that's nearly 300 years old.

I biked on in to Latham and cleaned up and they came and picked me up for dinner. Which (besides the good company and tasty meal at a pub overlooking the Hudson River) spared me from a meal at the Old Country Buffet (a place with tables you can extend out so obese folks can fit). Fast food gets blamed for the obesity epidemic but I think these buffet feed houses have a big share of the responsibility.

We went to some beautiful falls in an old mill town outside albany at sunset after dinner ... Lovely. Lots of water from all the rain. The town had old factories that were abandoned - some converted into condos and apartments. And run down mill worker housing that had seen better days. They were not recovering easily from the outsourcing that killed their economy.

A great day.

Tomorrow I go to Vermont for the first time ever for a healthy climbing day. Looking forward to it.

Ride stats summary so far ... this is a lot of cheeseburgers

44 Ride Days
Distance:		3,556.72 mi
Time:		241:36:27 hh:mm:ss
Elevation Gain:		152,802 ft
Avg Speed:		14.7 mph
Calories:		173,838 C (350 cheeseburgers)

Day 48: Liverpool to Little Falls, New York

Today we followed the Erie Canal as we rode east.

It's remarkable to think that thing was dug by hand in the early 1800s. It is one big ditch ... what a job. It was expanded 3 times. It had to have over 50 locks to raise the water level several hundred feet between Albany and Lake Erie so it's amazing engineering for the time. It's credited with populating Western New York and opening up commerce to the Great Lakes regions. There are several offshoots we have also seen along the way.

Now the canals are still full of water in some sections and dry in others. Roads have been built across them creating dams. Some towns are working to restore their sections for tourism, though apparently the canal-s use for commerce is up. The sections of the canals I've seen are narrow with dikes on either side with a foot or bicycle path on the top of the dike where the horses used to be led to pull the boats. Many are full of logs and plants and lily pads and the water does not look inviting for a swim ... black to green with lots of - umm shall we call it biodiversity - some that bites. Trees drape over the water and greenery and flowers line the sides.

Check out wikipedia or www.eriecanal.org for more info.

The further I rode east the wetter I got. I rode into and overtook a front that was dumping cool rain on Little Falls. Had I known that I would have ridden slower - the slower riders stayed dry for once - but I decided to go ahead and get in today so I could make sure to coordinate plans to meet a friend tomorrow, do laundry and other travel chores. Jim pointed out that it has rained 5 of the last 8 riding days ... I feel sorry for the folks up here who are getting such a cool wet summer.

And a note to New York drivers ... what they say about you - all the bad stuff - is TRUE. Slow down already! Quit pulling out in front of me - I'm traffic too and going faster than you think. And don't blow your horn with that nasty honk (as opposed to the hello I'm behind you toot)- I know I'm slower and your horn won't make me pedal at 50 mph. My life 3 seconds out of your day to slow down and be safe.

OK, thanks for bearing with me. Now I feel better with a good venting since I've been thinking it the last couple of days.

Tomorrow I'm very excited - our route goes within a short distance of my friend Zoe's and her families home in Schenectady, NY so they are meeting me on the route and then we're having dinner tomorrow night. Yeah!

We only have 4 ride days left on this trip ... that's just insane. Traumatic, even. I mean ... go back to work?!?

Day 47: Canandaigua to Liverpool NY (women's rights, salt and the Erie Canal)

The reason I became engaged in politics and motivated to learn about how be an effective advocate was because I believed so strongly that we need to continue to work for women's equality.

I learned leadership skills co-founding the women's group on campus. I did my Washington DC internship at an advocacy organization promoting women's economic parity and we got a bill passed that prohibited banks from requiring a male cosigner for a woman to get credit or a loan (among other things that were hurting divorced or widowed women and contributing to high poverty rates after divorce.). When I moved to DC after college it was with the intention of landing a job where I could help write or pass bills that would help women. The Clarence Thomas Hearings with Anita Hills testimony on sexual harassment shook me to my core and re-grounded me in why advocacy for women matters and why I was pursuing this career. I've always worked to elect women to office and help young women who want to break into this business.

So today when we went through Seneca Falls, the birthplace of the women's rights movement, it was a very moving and meaningful personal visit for me.

The National Park Service has preserved the Methodist church where the first Womens Rights Convention in 1848 as the Women's Rights National Historic Park. It's a shell of the church with a wall sculpture that includes the written declaration that women and men signed at the end of the meeting. The declaration is very powerful to read now to see how far we've come ... And that there is still more work to do. Here is more info. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Sentiments

It was raining but not cold today which made for tolerable if damp riding. That allowed lots of lingering and exploring, even after staying in Seneca Falls for at least 2 hours. Most interesting was the town of Camillus where part of an expansion of the Erie Canal ran through. The town has established a park and a gravel path by a 2 mile stretch of the canal. I was poking around and a lady runs out and asked "Are you part of the group that rode from San Francisco?". She then informed me I must ride down the gravel path and gave me direction on ho9w to get back on route. So of course I go ... What's 2 miles of gravel at this point. The town has invested in rebuilding an aqueduct that routed the canal over a creek. They are trying to rebuild it as much as possible as it would have existed in the mid 1800s, and they have succeeded in building the bet of the canal and are not letting it fill with water. I was trying to figure out what part did what and a man walked up with a camera. So I just asked him "can you tell me about this aqueduct?". Turns out he has been down there most days watching as it has been built. He told me about where the leak was, that there were steel bolts under the pegs that were made to look like pegged joints. And how the lock works to release water into the river below, where to stand to get the best picture and how much the project was costing the city (2.9 million) and why they were building it (so they could make the dinner boat trip go 2 miles on the strip of canal rather than 1 mile). Love meeting people like him.
The trail itself was beautiful. Saw tons of wildlife in a mile stretch - turtle, rabbit, chipmunks, heron and other water birds and a healthy cadre of hungry mosquitoes.

As I got into Liverpool (just west of Syracuse) I realized our hotel was out on the edge of town, so I tooled around Main street and the town square and then headed towards Lake Onondaga. The town has built a great park with trails and the lake is lovely. But most interesting in a museum built in the 1930s as part of the public works money. This museum retold the history of the Salt works by the lake which produced huge quantities of salt from natural salt springs. A tax on the salt provided enough funds to pay for half the cost of the Erie Canal.

Better was the volunteer running the museum. When I asked here how all the canals connected, she pulled out a piece of paper and started drawing. One of her favorite things to do is take boat trips on the canals, which sounds like that could be fun. She was telling me about how the railroads would build really low bridges over the canals to make sure barges couldn't carry to large a loads ... Nasty railroads.

The younger volunteer there was very cute and asked me, "Are you a professional rider or something to do this?". No, just a normal person with a stubborn streak and a calloused butt. Actually they kept me so long the Bike staff sent out a rescue party .... Oops.

So a great if damp day. Tomorrow we ride 79 miles to Little Falls and I'm looking forward to what's next.

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.

Day 43, 44, 45: Youngstown to Erie, Rest Day, Hamburg

For most people a barrier across the road with a "Road closed" sign would logically imply that you could not go past that point. But not for us.

For us these Road Closed signs are an announcement that unknown challenges are coming up. Often the ABB staff catch a lot of the construction and re-route us. But not always, or there is not another option. So we've navigated around moving bulldozers, construction workers, torn out sections of highway, rough grade and lifted bikes over and crawled under numerous barriers. But even with all these bike gymnastics behind us, our road closed surprise for Youngstown to Erie was a doozie.

The west end of the road was pretty straight forward - walk down dirt grade, lift the bike a couple of feet onto a cement wall, walk across the wall and then climb up a small incline out. No big deal. But then half a mile down the road were two ditch diggers blocking the road with shovels down (luckily it was Sunday so no work or we would have had a big detour on an already long day and our 4th century ride in a row - no one wanted more miles).

In between the ditch diggers was a 10 foot wide and 6 foot deep gap in the road with re bar sticking out, huge loose broken chunks of road and mud. A deep, wide ditch with shoe sucking mud and water was on either side. Hmmm ... 8 or 10 of us collected and stood and discussed and pondered. Finally we send a couple of sacrificial cyclists into the ditch and had a third climb out the other side. We pass the bikes one by one across and stack them against the bulldozer. Then we make our way through the safest looking trail across and climbed out. One thing this trip has done has made me much less tentative to take my bike anywhere.

The Youngstown to Erie route went through farms and small towns in Northeast Ohio. Rolling hills, wildflowers, lots of birds and time through the woods which I hadn't realized I missed so much.

Close the Pennsylvania border I was pedaling along and saw a beautiful covered bridge hiding down curve in a hill. I pull a u turn and head down and ride through the bridge. It was the Root Road Bridge, painted with a simple v shaped roof. The sides were latticed with beautiful woodwork. And the floor were long thin vertical boards with tire grooves worn in through the middle of the bridge.

I wasn't the only one with that idea ... On the other side of the old timbered bridge the Pattons from Pennsylvania were on their driving vacation and taking a tour of the covered bridges - 21 in this county alone. They were heading on to Indianapolis and I told them about the Overbeck sisters and encouraged them visit since they are interested in art.

Shortly after we came to Richardson's White Turkey Root Beer Stand which I think may qualify as one of the best burger stands ever. First off, I don't like root beer, but they made their own in a barrel and I loved their root beer - especially with a bunch of ice cream on top for one heck of a good root beer float. Yum!

Finally properly fueled for the rest of our 100 mile ride we start approaching Lake Erie. We swung through a community park by lake and ... This is one big lake. You can't see across it. The only Great Lake I'd seen before is Lake Michigan from Chicago. It really brought home the huge size of these lakes ... Impressive. I'm psyched to be in this part of the country and the end of the trip .... It's all new country to me.

The next day was a rest day in Erie. Erie is a town that has seen better times. We stayed in a hotel downtown that has seen better days and the city had the feel of a struggling town, a little grungy but with some working class routes that still ran strong.

But rather than stay in Erie and explore, Steve from Florida organized 5 of us into a car load and we headed up the see Niagara Falls. As we were driving along the interstate north it was remarkable how this interstate could be a stretch of road almost anywhere in the country ... Unremarkable in any way. I hope when I drive in the future I will always remember to take a little extra time and get off the interstate and go through the back roads. That's where all the action is.

I must be one of only a handful of Americans who had never been to Niagara Falls. We went to the Canadian side - it was packed on a Monday. After admiring the falls, and being suitably amused and appalled by all the tacky tourist stuff (Ripleys, 2 wax museums - one featuring Britney Spears in wax, hershey chocolate store, a space needle type observatory, helicopter rides, gondola rides, haunted house, pet the animals) ... It was non-stop kitsch. And this was Canada ... Can't imagine what was on the American side.

After admiring the falls and getting very wet in the spray we headed north to Niagara by the Lake, a small town on Lake Ontario that Steve went to with his wife on their second honeymoon. He took us all to lunch at the Prince of Wales hotel - very nice, very tasty. My inner food snob was satisfied. Then we went wine tasting to a couple of wineries recommended by our waitress. First was to her husbands families vineyard ... It was OK for wine though Sean was mighty happy with the ice wine milk shake. And it was good.

Then to Hillebrand Winery - which made a Reisling I liked for lunch and wonderful Ice Wines.

Finally back in Erie after a grand day Jack, Sean (Brit) and I went to the baseball game - Erie Seawolves versus Akron Aeros. AA baseball - the Seawolves feed up to the Detroit Tigers. The stadium was packed - sanding room only and a few box seats left. It was Buck night - beer, popcorn, dogs and pizza for $1. Big draw for Monday night. Tons of fun. Erie won. One of my favorite things about minor league ball is all the crowd participation games they do in between innings - kid sack race, fans doing a hula hoop relay, hundreds of kids turned loose to run the field, men in tutus. Great community fun. Love it.

Blame the game for no blog up yesterday ...

Today

We rode from Erie 82 miles to Hamburg, New York. Claims to be the originator of the Hamburger ... I bet that's disputed.

But for me the claim to fame will be that it's the wettest, longest ride I've ever ridden. However I did keep a sense of humor ... Maybe helped by the 9AM wine tasting just before the rain really started. When I say wet, I mean foggy glasses, torrents of rain that would accumulate somewhere in my clothes and then gush in torrents down my legs. Drenched for hours, feet prunes in the water sloshing in my shoes. Every time I stood up on the saddle and then sat down again, the water would audibly squish out of the padded shorts. So much mud and road grit up my back and on my butt and thrown all the way into my hair that I stood in the bathtub to pull off the layers of clothes to collect all the dirty. Well - you get the picture. It probably would have been a beautiful ride if we could see anything ... The first few miles were lovely with all the vineyards.