Finally home!
Rides:
7/25
7/26
7/27
7/28
7/29
7/30
7/31-1 and
7/31-2
I survived my week on the Erie Canal Trail. And that's probably a pretty apt way to describe it - survival. The trail itself is pretty tame - a lot of crushed gravel with little elevation change - but two things made the whole experience a unique challenge. First and foremost, there was the weather. The temps in western New York were hovering around 90 with a really high dew point all week, but even that wasn't the hard part - that would be the sun. The sun was so brutally strong all the time. It really felt like there was a 20 degree difference between being in the shade and being in the sun. After I finished my ride on Monday, I couldn't bear to be outside for more than a minute. It just felt like there was nothing filtering the sun at all.
a typical section of the EC Trail … when it was a trail ...
The second thing about the ride was the many sections where the trail wasn't actually a trail at all. For example, there were 30 miles of road between Lyons and Weedsport that were all just Route 31.
There were way too many miles of this on the so-called Erie Canal "Trail".
The road sections weren't especially difficult -- they were just unnecessary. I knew there was
some road out there from the research I'd done before the ride, but two sections in particular -- that Lyons-Weedsport run and the last 20 miles of the ride from Lockport to Niagara Falls -- were just way too long to be on a road. There was supposed to be a link up in Lyons to an alternate route down in Montezuma, but as much as I looked for it, I found no trailhead that led to it. All I could find was the green "Bike Route 5" signs on Route 31. And why they haven't been able to create a trail to connect the Niagara Riverway Trail to the Lockport canal trail is beyond me -- there was plenty of room for it along the way and the current connection is a high traffic roadway with signs that say "Please Share the Road".
At any rate, it wasn't all just sun and roads. There was some really cool scenery out there, too.
And another cool thing … on one particularly long, empty section of trail between Syracuse and Rome, someone goes out and puts coolers full of water and/or Gatorade for passers-by. Just a really cool thing to do -- there was literally no stores or even homes along the trail there for maybe 25 miles.
By Wednesday, I was toast. I was really glad to just have a day to relax more or less and only did 23 miles around the city. Then I drove my car out to Niagara Falls and caught a train back so that my buddy wouldn't have to do a round trip ride with me the following day. He doesn't ride as much and was worried about doing the 85 miles both days. So I told him I'd drive out so we could do the trip one way only. With the oppressive heat, I figured that was a better option. That turned out to be a good idea -- he did fine the next day but was pretty wrecked by the time we finished. Asking him to do another 85 miles the next morning would have been a lot. So instead, we hung out in Niagara Falls after the ride and I had the best Souther Tier Pumking Ale I've ever had (they dipped the glass in cinnamon -- I've never seen that before, but it's a brilliant idea!)
After dinner, my buddy was exhausted so he went to sleep and I walked over to get a look at the Falls.
The next morning, I went out for an early ride before check out time and took a few more mandatory Falls photos, including one with a mist rainbow …
And then we drove back to Rochester, hit up the Gennesee Brewery for lunch (yeah - they make Genny Cream Ale, but they also do a bunch of micro-brews for their brewpub. It was a pretty awesome place.)
And just like that, the trip was done. I drove home this morning and figured out the numbers for the week: 485 miles in just under 38 hours of ride time. And about 1,025 miles in 84 1/2 hours for the month, with about 850 of those miles on the single speed. I'm sure those numbers aren't going to win it, but I'm happy with them -- especially the 1K+ for the full month. Since I rarely ride on the road, that's my highest single total mileage for a single month since I started recording it on my Garmin.
Anyway, congratulations to everyone who finished or even tried this contest. It's a lot tougher to do than it sounds!