Today would be an inverse of yesterday; the first half of the day starting out on canal gravel, the second half on rolling roads. We again had nice weather and nice riding.
The canal opened up more to views. We counted 15 blue herons, the last one sitting right by the path as we got to Brockport where we left the canal.
We saw a few bikes on the trail and an occasional walker, but it was pretty quiet in general. It looks like there’s a tourist operation that will take you on a boat excursion with bikes to toodle around on when you get to town.
Brockport was fairly charming, got a panino and coffee at a downtown cafe. We saw some weather coming in, so sat there for 90 minutes or so as the rain went by. It never got so hard that we couldn’t have ridden in it but it was nicer to not have to break out the rain gear. As it was, the roads were pretty much dry by the time we got rolling.
Nancy wanted to get at least some riding in the Finger Lakes area, so we were heading south from the Erie Canal on roads that aren’t commonly used for cycling. Most casual cyclists, and also the Northern Tier route, stick to the canal; there aren’t a lot of people riding between there and the Finger Lakes. The route we were taking, heading towards Conesus Lake, doesn’t have a well-defined route, and GPS heatmaps were ambiguous. So we headed out of Bridgeport on Main Street, which turned into an acceptable but not very fun road, with a wide shoulder but busy. Once we jumped off and started tacking back and forth on farm roads it was mostly pretty nice.
The AirBNB we were staying at was outside of any town, so we decided to grab some provisions to make dinner in the kitchen. The only market on our route was a convenience store that didn’t have much appealing stuff, so we went a couple of klicks out of our way to a real grocery. We picked up some perogies and peas along with stuff for the morning, then got back on track. (Kind of literally, as part of our route was a rail-trail that still had railroad signals.)
We were pushing 60km for the day at this point, and after the stop, Nancy, who had been doing pretty well, was starting to lose steam. We still had 10km to go, over rolling terrain, and it took some doing to get her home. But if you keep pedaling, you’ll get there, and our host Jennifer and her two dogs did a great job greeting us and getting us settled with orange juice and honeycrisp apples.
A bath for Nancy, shower for me, making dinner, drinking beer, and rounding out the day by watching Cal-FSU football (I can’t believe there’s a band worse than USC’s).
Tomorrow we’ll head to Conesus Lake. The place we’re staying is at the north end of the lake, and depending on how Nancy feels, and the weather, we may just do the short ride there (~40km), or go there, drop our bags, and circumnavigate the lake (~70km).