I always embrace the chance to have a different kind of cycling experience, and the three phases of this trip gave me a number of opportunities.

The plan was for a relatively short day. After breaking camp, I decided to check out the park’s mountain biking trails; with the full touring rig it was a little spicy. The ride was mostly flat or downhill from here, not so much of the rolling terrain I’d spent the last few days coming through. I’d drop 200 meters over the course of the day.

The morning would be riding through Letchworth State Park, known as the Grand Canyon of the East; probably overstating the case, but it’s pretty comparable to Big Bend and some of the other features of the Southwest. Really quite impressive granitic river bends with autumnal trees.

Because I had chosen to camp two nights at Keuka, today’s day would be the longest on the trip. The route I’d sketched out came to 105km, but the last few days had shown me to check the terrain before I finalized the plan for the day. A couple of the straight-line roads looked like they went straight up steep ridges; I’d probably be better off doing some more distance and skirting some of the drumlins.

Route research had identified Keuka Lake as the nicest lake to circumnavigate; today’s route plan was just to go around it. The weather had other ideas.

From Ithaca I’d be gradually making my way back to Buffalo through the Finger Lakes region. That meant cutting across the glaciated landscape, which in turn meant a lot more climbing than I’d been doing so far. Today’s route would start with 500m of climbing, some of it steep. The weather was lovely, so with some rest and recuperation behind us, we were in for a great day.

I was now over a week on the road and in desperate need of laundry and a chill-out day, so John was going to show me around Ithaca a bit. Ithaca is Gorges, as you may have heard, and there are interesting waterfalls all over the place. We visited the campus and Moosewood Restaurant.

John went to Cornell, so we were headed into his home turf. Ithaca is at the south end of Cayuga Lake; my original plan had been to ride down the east side of the lake, but John brought to my attention that riding the west side would bring us by Taughannock Falls, the tallest waterfall east of the Rockies. Seemed like a good plan.

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. Today would a big day to start with, 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, mostly avoiding the rain during the day.