Day 21 - Brockport

I woke up in Geneva to a morning that was warm and oppresivly humid. Though the temperatures wouldn’t rise as far as they had the previous day, it was still going to be in the upper 80’s to low 90’s. My hope was that the route would put me closer to cooler bodies of water.

I just had around 75 miles to accomplish along mostly cinder trail. But first I had to take a direct line north to meet with the Erie canal.

But when I got up to the bike in the morning I was greeted with an old, familiar sight. My back tire was profoundly flat again. This indicated a slow leak — something that I couldn’t see when I had resolved the major flat the day before.

So I got it pumped up enough to not cause serious damage as I rode it about 1000ft to a gas station I noted had free air the day before.

I went through the familiar routine of practically dismantling the rear end, but now with the added annoyance of attempting to find the leak. At least I had infinite free, fast air at my disposal.

So with the tube out, I inflated it to around 8psi and listened carefully for a leak. I felt around for a leak. I could not hear, see, or feel anything that fit the bill. So I let the tube rest on the back of my trailer while I investigated my “spare” tub. Scare quotes because I knew this tube also wouldn’t hold air because way back outside of Harrisonburg it failed and I never got around to fixing it.

I pumped it up, and immediately the slow leak I suspected became completely apparent. It wasn’t so much a slow leak as a gaping hole. How I missed this, I have no clue. It was patched and inflated again and set aside to see if it would hold.

I returned to the other tube which was now… flaccid. I again took a stab at trying to find any leak I could. The best I could summon up in my searching were two very small scuff marks so I patched them anyway. After this work was done I looked back at the “spare” which I had patched minutes before. It was clearly holding air as it was just as firm as it had been when I set it down. So into the tire it went.

With the attendant, sweating struggle, I finally wrangled everything back into place. It only consumed a very small hour of my day, and now that the sun was fully out it was genuinely starting to get hot.

Leaving Geneva, I took an erroneous detour of about a mile through all manner of wonderfully well maintained historic houses in the neighborhoods outside the town center. Some with turrets or crenelations. Others with Widows peaks or observation decks.

Eventually I got back on track and finally exited Geneva.

The first 20 miles of my journey put me back onto the friendly rolling farmland I’d come to appreciate in Pennsylvania and New York. The route had wide shoulders and the riding was easy. It was a huge buoy to my mood from the previous day to be away from fast moving traffic on a sun blasted highway.

Suddenly I got an audio prompt to take a left and there I was on the Erie Canal trail:

What you’re looking at is the first American Superhighway. Commissioned in 1817 by Clinton DeWitt, governor of NY it represented a wholly state funded capital venture. Jefferson, the president at the time, refused to commit federal funds as he and many others saw the project as overly ambitious.

The purpose of the canal, which stretches from Buffalo to Albany, a distance of 386miles, was to open up the fertile midwest farmlands to easy transport of goods to the eastern seaboard. To accomplish this necessitates threading through the low Appalachians in upper NY. The canal itself wends its route through the Mohawk Valley, the single low gap in the range.

Constructed entirely on the backs of migrants and mulepower it was a training camp for American engineers because prior to its groundbreaking there were no universities or schools in the US training civil engineers in such projects. As a result the 80+ locks and aqueducts were devised and executed with no prior experience, and yet worked well.

In the decades directly after its completion it allowed transport costs for goods from the American interior to drop from nearly $100 per ton to less than $10. The tolls it collected paid for its construction within a single decade.

Not only this but the people moving power and commerce that the canal afforded caused a huge boom for towns like Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Ithaca, not to mention NYC which became the preeminent Eastern port as a direct result of the canal’s commerce, outpacing Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston.

Only a handful of decades later the canal was overshadowed by railroad travel, but it still exists as an important arterial for recreation and to a lesser extent commerce.

The old mule path beside the canal, which was used by gangs of horses or mules that would pull the barges, has been converted into the Erie Canal Trail that I was going to take to Buffalo.

The path along the canal was slower overall than surface roads due to the crushed gravel and cinder. I made perhaps 14-16mph versus my normal 17-22, but it was flat as a pancake apart from the frequent rises to and over cross-roads.

I had expected the canal to take me through the heart of Rochester, but either due to the way it was constructed, or perhaps the way Rochester has augmented the trail, I somewhat skirted the main city and was wholly swaddled in the cover of a greenway during my transit.

The small towns that directly abut the canal are often tourist attractions. The town that I stopped to have lunch in was one such town, chock full of the sorts of tourist shops and brightly colored main thoroughfare, and it being a Friday, it was jam packed with people.

I think I’ve expressed my dislike for these sorts of attractions while on tour before. I much prefer the dusty local diner to some dockside bistro. I may be in oddity in the diner, but I don’t feel wildly out of place.

When I finally reached Brockport at around 4pm I was glad to be done with the trail for the day.

Beka had arranged for me to stay at the local United Methodist Church. My contact was a man named Terry and so I went directly there. He gave me a code to buzz myself into the building where I disembarked my equipment and had a look around the air conditioned section of the church. When he arrived he gave me a brief tour and we talked for a short while.

Their sanctuary was on the upper floor and we passed through and I snapped a picture.

Terry got me situated with internet and showed me some food and drink he had set aside for me before letting me know that there was a visitor’s center with showers available.

So after thanking Terry I quickly made my way over to the Dollar general for shampoo and then went to the visitors center for a shower.

Just as I left the shower the sky opened up with rain for about 15 minutes. So I happily sat on some steps under cover and waited it out while I determined where and what I would eat.

There was an Afghan Shwarma restaurant, and so my day ended with me enjoying a tasty meal and some air-conditioning and sleeping on a couch.