Eastbounders on the Erie Canal towpath.
Bridge over the Erie Canal.
| Day | 6 |
| Date | Thursday June 28, 2001 |
| Distance | 69 miles |
| Moving Average Speed | 12.8 mph |
| Left at | 7:30 AM |
| Arrived at | 3:00 PM |
| Overnight in | Niagara County Camping Resort, northeast of Lockport, NY |
| Latitude | 43 d 14 m 1 s N |
| Longitude | 78 d 37 m 41 s W |
| Cumulative Distance | 543 miles |
Today is my 32nd birthday; I can't think of how I would rather have spent it than doing exactly what I was doing today: riding a bicycle across the US.
After my conversation with Ian, the eastbounder from Seattle, I went over my mileage estimate again, and I came up with very nearly the same figure I had before; namely, 4073 miles. I suppose Ian could have been wrong, but that's unlikely since cyclists by and large are very scrupulous about getting credit for every inch travelled. More likely his route (which I know is not the same as mine) is shorter. He did say he had taken Interstate 90 across Montana and North Dakota. Personally, I think half the point of an adventure such as this is getting away from the interstates, so I'm not much tempted to deviate to save miles.
As of today, the average daily mileage is 90, but that statistic will go down a lot over the next two days since tomorrow is another short day and Saturday I'm not moving at all. However, it is interesting to note that if this pace is extrapolated forward, it puts me on a seven week schedule to reach Seattle, right in the middle of the six-to-eight week estimate I gave at the beginning.
It was a pretty easy day today. I've been planning to stay with a friend of mine from college in Buffalo, Owen Harrison, and it was going to be more convenient for him to have me arrive tomorrow (Friday) than today, so I inserted a day. This is convenient for me as well, since it means I can take a leisurely day through Niagara Falls and get my snapshots and postcards and all that.
I spent the day switching between two different recommended bicycling routes: the one from Adventure Cycling which says take the canal towpath and the one from the state of New York which says take route 31. In places such as Rochester, route 31 is a pretty busy road and not much fun to bike on. In other places, the canal towpath deteriorates quite a bit and its hard to make any time on it. Fortunately the two routes are close and parallel for most of the distance so switching back and forth as the moment demands is not a problem.
I ran into more eastbounders today: this time a retired couple from Santa Ana, CA who had flown to Cleveland and were riding east from there. We performed the usual rituals observed by long-distance tourists under these circumstances: we exchanged information on routes and roads and other cyclists headed that way and then parted ways after the obligatory "happy trails".
Eastbounders on the Erie Canal towpath.
Bridge over the Erie Canal.
Tonight I'm in a campground that is an example of a phenomenon that I had not realized existed in this country before I started touring. It turns out that there are a lot of "campgrounds" in this country that basically serve as summer (or even year-round) homes for folks that can't afford the more traditional variety. They bring an RV or a trailer to the "campground", pay a seasonal rate, and establish themselves as permanent residents of the "campsite" for the duration. Naturally, most folks want something more for a home than what they get from a camper, and so a lot of them have built additions onto their campers that are more permanent structures than the campers they are supposed to be enhancing: framed in two-by-fours with wood siding, glass windows and the works, it makes one wonder why they bother to maintain the pretense of living in the camper. Some of them have even built little fences around their "campsites" and put lawn ornaments within!
"Campers" in Lockport, New York.
It occurred to me that this is hardly a new phenomenon in this country. If you go to the town of Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard, the area around the Old Iron Tabernacle is filled with dozens of gorgeous, tiny carpenter-gothic wooden houses that were built there by folks who came to the Vineyard for the camp meeting revival, but liked it so much there that they started staying for the whole summer. They only had their tent sites from the camp meeting to build more permanent structures on, so the houses had to be very small. But I suppose a sort of keeping-ahead-of-the-Joneses effect made them get more and more elaborate. Anyway, it was clearly the same phenomenon going on there over a hundred years ago that I am seeing around me here in my campground in Lockport.
I should add, as a final bizarre postscript, that just as I was settling into my tent to go to sleep I had a visit from my neighbor in the next campsite who wanted to warn me about his dogs. He said "They don't bite, really, well there was that one little girl, but she charged him ...." I wonder what the backstory to the incident alluded to is. I admit I lacked the courage at the time to ask.