I was entering phase 2 of the trip, riding with my friend John. We’ve toured before, San Francisco to LA, but it was a while ago. So long ago that he had a camera which stored images on 3.5” floppy disks. But we’ve kept in touch, and he’s been doing a lot of touring himself, on bike and motorcycle. Today would a big day to start with, though, almost 100km, and the weather was threatening all day long. We wanted to get a decently early start, so after a very nice breakfast at the diner around the corner, and meeting some of the resident hippies at the co-op, we got on the road.
For the rest of the trip I’d be camping, and I had planned to stop by an outdoor store for camp stove fuel. Mapping it out, though, a trip by REI would add 15km to an already long day, so we decided to skip it. John had some of the same isopro fuel that my stove used, and we were probably going to get dinner in town anyway.
The Erie Canal Trail doesn’t go straight through Rochester; it dips quite a bit to the south before coming back north. Because we were planning a long day, we cut off the dip and went across Rochester on city streets, which were mostly fine. We hit the canal at Fairport, where there were more people walking on the trail than Nancy and I had seen elsewhere. All friendly and generally easy to move out of the way.
John and I were getting our riding styles and communication together. I had been training more than he had, so I wound up taking most of the pulls into the fairly stiff headwind. We made pretty good time on the well-signed trail, and decided that we’d look for a lunch spot in Palmyra, which is where the Adventure Cycling Northern Tier route splits off from the Empire State Trail. Just when we started looking for a place we came upon the charming Muddy Waters Cafe right near the bridge we’d be riding. We were done with the first phase of the day, about 35km of 98km, and phase 2 was another 35km on the canal trail.
The showers kept chasing us so we kept things moving along, and managed to finish the last of the gravel just as we started to feel raindrops. We thought about trying to find a restaurant in the town where we were to wait out the storm, but looking at the radar it might have been a couple of hours or more. We still had 30km to ride, and it was about 3PM, with sunset at 7:00. We agreed that as long as we didn’t get too soaked out there, we’d head south and try to get to Seneca Falls, the last town before camp, before the worst of the storm moved in.
The elevation profile showed a lot of short ups and downs, and that’s what the riding was like; nothing more than maybe 20 meters of climbing at once, but lots of rollers, some of them steep. It was slow going, late in the day with legs cramping. We kept it rolling as the showers came through, sometimes almost clearing, sometimes getting decently wet, mostly just spotting rain as we headed south.
The fastest way to Seneca Falls would have been Highway 414, but the better biking route is Trye Road to Gravel Road (which is not actually gravel), along the side of the Montezuma Nature Preserve. Very low traffic and good pavement. Lots of “NO SOLAR” signs; traditional farmers are threatened by solar farms coming into this area.
Traffic picked up when we crossed a major road near town. We reached the city during a heavier bit of rain, sheltered under the first doorway we saw, and looked for where we could get a cheeseburger. Right up there street there was a bar and grill with an awning we could stash the bikes under. We got some Rorhbach Vanilla Porter (pretty nice) while we waited for the rain to pass.
Leaving the pub around 6, we were only a few klicks from the state park. An easy roll to the lake shoreline, too late to check in at camp, but knew our site number. Population at the park was sparse on a rainy day like this, and our site was pretty nice under the trees. We were able to get camp set up before the rain returned (it did, later), and snuggled into our tents for a well-earned rest.
