Bike Diary #2 sent Wednesday June 27, 2001

Day	3
Date	Monday June 25, 2001
Distance	108 miles
Moving Average Speed	12.6 mph
Left at	9:30 AM
Arrived at	7:00 PM
Overnight in	Glimmerglass State Park near Cooperstown, NY
Latitude	42 d 47 m 8 s N
Longitude	74 d 51 m 50 s W
Cumulative Distance	291 miles

After a very late start, I discovered that the weather gods had changed their minds about my project and decided to provide me with near-perfect cycling conditions. So in spite of the late start and a moderately sore knee I decided to make hay while the sun was shining instead of taking a shorter day as I had originally planned.

Crossing the Hudson River in Hudson, New York

The day went pretty smoothly. I took my first bite out of the Catskills today and with the exception of one heart-breaking grade 87 miles into today's ride, they have proven to be alot easier than the Berkshires were (compare today's average speed with yesterday's to see the effect). Not much to report, today was mostly about grinding out the miles.

One interesting quirk: when I arrived at Glimmerglass State Park, there was a note in the window of the ranger's office listing the campsites that were not reserved for the night and instructing guests to move in and expect a visit from the ranger later in the evening to collect the camping fee. So I did and he did, but an hour later I had a second visit from the same ranger who came to refund my $15.75 camping fee. Apparently his supervisor "has a lot of respect for" crazy guys like me who try to bicycle across the country and figures we deserve a free night of camping for our efforts.

Day	4
Date	Tuesday June 26, 2001
Distance	74 miles
Moving Average Speed	12.2 mph
Left at	8:30 AM
Arrived at	7:00 PM
Overnight in	Chittenango Falls State Park southeast of Syracuse, NY
Latitude	42 d 58 m 47 s N
Longitude	75 d 50 m 42 s W
Cumulative Distance	365 miles

It was a short distance today because I spent most of the morning in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. That is definitely worth a visit, even if you are not a hardcore baseball fan (and I am not).

Then I turned west, which is to say perpendicular to the direction of the Catskills (or parallel to their gradient, if you prefer). This meant that instead of following valleys between hills, I was forced to confront them head on and the day turned into and endless series of long tedious ascents followed by breathtaking descents with a small town in the valley. The continuous up and down made it impossible to make any time.

As I was creeping up one of the long ascents, I was reminded of one of the basic principles of railroad engineering. When building a line between points A and B, one should find the highest point between the two and then make a gradual ascent to that point and a gradual descent from it to minimize the cost of operating the railroad. Any deviation from this ideal is referred to as "redundant grade". On a bicycle, screaming downhill at 30 mph is exciting but very wasteful since the energy you put into climbing the hill is squandered in wind resistance. The energy lost to wind resistance per unit distance (i.e. the force) grows as the velocity squared; this means you won't get nearly as much distance for your hard-earned energy on a rapid descent as you will on a gradual one.

Crossing the Catskills was all about redundant grade. No railroad engineer in his right mind would try to build a line along US 20 in New York State. In fact, they didn't, the railroad and the Erie Canal before it were built a good deal north of US 20.

After sweating up a few redundant grades I stopped in at the Red Door Restaurant in West Winfield. There a few friendly locals gave me dire warnings about the "Pompey Hills" coming up on route 20. "They put that road in back in '70, and they didn't make any unnecessary cuts." Since there was agreement among three locals about the difficulty of crossing the "Pompey Hills", and since they were dire enough to rate not only local recognition but their own special name, I decided that I would get plenty of exercise on my way to Seattle even if I routed myself around the "Pompey Hills". Therefore I departed route 20 in Cazenovia, NY, my plan being to take refuge from the hills along the southern shore of Oneida Lake and north of Syracuse and the join the railroad and the canal west of Syracuse. That also put a very convenient state park in my way for an overnight, which is where I am as I am writing this.

I did run into another long-distance cyclist on route 20 today. He was headed east on his way from Sioux Falls, SD to Bennington, VT. He was the sort who eschews (or perhaps hasn't heard of) national cycling organizations and expensive equipment. He was riding a middling-quality mountain bike, wearing a painter's cap and baggy shorts, and had made it from Erie, PA to Syracuse, NY in four days (pretty darn good time). He just got on a bike with a AAA map and went. He did mention that he had passed a westbound couple doing a perimeter tour of the US in Erie who were hoping to make Washington State by August 31. I'm hoping to get there by August 15, and there's a good chance that they are followng the same Northern Tier route as I, so if we all stick to our schedules I should overtake them. They're about 8-9 days ahead of me now, so I probably won't close the gap until we get out west somewhere.

Chittenango Falls, New York

Today I finally passed through the difficult terrain of the Catskills and came into the promised land: the Erie Canal and level ground. I left Chittenango Falls this morning still planning to follow Madison County route 3 to state road 31 and follow that along the southern shore of Oneida Lake and north of Syracuse. Imagine my surprise when only a couple of miles north of Chittenango I crossed what was unmistakably a canal with a crushed stone towpath headed west. The sign said "Old Erie Canal State Park and Trailway".

Old Erie Canal towpath.

As it turns out, that word "Old" is packed full of meaning. What the sign should have said was something like "original Erie Canal, abandoned shortly after the turn of the twentieth century in favor of a rebuilt canal to the north that goes through Oneida Lake." However, the sign said nothing of the sort, and so I assumed I had hit the towpath that the Adventure Cycling Northern Tier route takes west of Palmyra, NY. Despite the fact that the towpath was unpaved (dry crushed stone is not alot worse than asphalt when you're riding on 700 X 35C tires), I could not resist the temptation of a level canal grade. I was hoping that it would take me right through Syracuse along a level grade all the way to Rochester. Instead, it ended abruptly after ten miles just outside of Syracuse.

It turns out that the path of the old Erie Canal through Syracuse was long ago filled in and paved over to make streets with suggestive names such as "Erie Boulevard". To the untrained eye, there really isn't much of a trace of the canal left in Syracuse. However, I decided to make the best of it and visited the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, which was pretty interesting.

West of Syracuse I picked up New York State bike route 5, a.k.a. state road 31 which parallels the (new) canal pretty nearly and has a nice level grade to it. I also got my first faceful of the headwinds that will persecute me all the way to the pacific. This slowed down progess, but not nearly as much as the hills had over the past two days (moving average speed it up, as you can see above).

I ran into another eastbound tourist today (if you think about it for a minute, you'll realize that practically all the tourists I'm going to run into on this trip will be eastbounders). "Ian" is doing my trip in reverse: he started from Seattle on April 13 and hopes to reach Boston in 8 days. I asked him if he didn't run into some weather at the higher elevations after such an early start. Apparently so, some of the Rocky Mountain passes (notably Lolo pass in Montana) had treated him to rain, snow and hail. I gave him my set of Rubel bike maps of western, central and eastern Massachusetts since they are of no use to me now and might help him considerably (they mark the big hills on those maps, in addition to recommended roads for cycling). I had 435 miles on my odomter, he had 2913. The sum of these two numbers (3348) is considerably less than my original estimate of the total distance from Boston to Seattle along the Northern Tier route (4000 miles), and could mean a difference of a full week of cycling. I will have to revisit that estimate.

Chip

I put in a good long day to celebrate reaching level terrain, but the time spent in the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse finally caught up to me in the late afternoon and I took refuge in a motel as the sun was getting too close to the horizon for my comfort.