Friday, May 19th
My second day spent travelling on the paths beside the Erie Canal as Niagara Falls, where i’ll join the Northern Tier route properly, comes slightly more into focus.
The further I go the more I realise I’ll have more days like this one. Days which pass perfectly smoothly and pleasantly but in the scheme of things will become lost in the blur of distance and time. I know that because i’m writing this a day late (instead of at the end of the day like I usually do) and i’m already struggling to recall the details of the places I passed through and what I saw there and what I thought about.
It was a cold morning, I could see my breathe on the air as I left my tent. Soon after I was out a guy waved and approached me from the lock. I was expecting him to ask for some kind of payment, but he said it was completely free to camp there, and that other locks along the canal should offer the same. He invited me inside a room which contained various valves and motors which controlled the lock. I wasn’t alert enough to follow how it all worked but I appreciated his enthusiasm and the aesthetics of the machinery which was now over a century old but well cared for.
I carried along the canal track. The next town was Little Falls, a quiet place near the rocky Moss Island. Then came Mohawk. It was bigger and livelier and had a few shops and restaurants. I stopped for coffee and some breakfast – two hot dogs for $3, the kind of breakfast you can get away with when you’re cycling 80 miles a day. The coffee was free – a promotion this particular chain of gas station was running until the end of the month. I filled a 20oz cup and drank it outside in the sun.
Next came Utica, a town I mixed up with Ithica, which I imagine is a very different place. Utica was bigger than the other towns i’d passed through. I can usually judge the size of a town by if it contains a Dunkin’ Doughnuts or not, or if it does then how many. Utica had one. But I bypassed the centre. I tried, when I could, to pick up food or snacks at the smaller towns rather than get sucked into the busy roads in the middle of a place like this.
The canal path was sometimes easy to lose, parts of it crossed roads, or the route became the road and the path seemed to vanish then pick up again later. I was using Google Maps to make my way and the sad thing is that whenever I tried to outsmart it or make a shortcut, Google was usually right. In this particular instance I managed to get lost in some deserted weed filled backroads or parking lots on the edge of the town. The only trace of life a large sign for ‘Bob’s Auto Parts’, though this was also becoming engulfed with weeds.
I found my way back on the path. A few people out cycling or walking, some fishing. It was most monotonous when there were trees on both sides. I just kept my head down and pedalled. At least with a river or road to the side there was a little bit more unexpected in your view. But I was keen to keep up the progress i’d made and if that meant some pretty but uneventful sections than that was fine.
The afternoon was hot but I kept going, there wasn’t much to stop for anyway. Two more towns, Rome and Verona, more canal paths, some agriculture, flags painted on things, God Bless America, white fences, out on the road then back on the path again. I’d become a bit fixated on the distance I was trying to cover and less concerned about what I was seeing. Above all I was still enjoying just being able to cycle this easily. In Japan it felt like I was just waiting for things to go wrong. But ever since i’d started cycling in America everything just worked.
I’m sure there would be hard times ahead, and that things would go wrong (with a 4000 mile ride that seems an ineventniability) but for now it was smooth sailing and how far I wanted to go was dictated by me, not by the bike, or at this point, the conditions.
I aimed for around 90 miles. I always find the last 10 miles of a day is a little sluggish. Your body keeps going but you mind and concentration starts to unravel slightly. I needed to find a place to camp. I wasn’t close to a lock like the one i’d spent the night at the day before, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find somewhere similar. Along the path itself is tricky, there’s not a lot of clear ground away from the path, but on the map i’d spotted a clearing a few miles ahead. When looking for places to camp I used Google Maps, switching to satellite mode to get a better idea of the surface I could expect, though of course it’s hard to tell until you actually see it in three dimensions.
I crossed the canal and the path emerged in a clearing by the water, picnic benches and grills, which meant it was designed for picnicking but I felt camping was also acceptable. I leaned my bike agains the bench and laid on top of it in the sun.
Map
