Angela is driving down to her church in Buckley and irritated that Google Maps keeps routing her along a slow set of small roads even though there’s hardly any traffic. She eventually discovers that yesterday she’s set the “Avoid Highways” option on during rush hour, and had forgotten to turn it off.
Bree completes her summer costuming class at Cornish College of the Arts. The class wraps up with a student art show, which Jan and Angela drive downtown to see. It’s fun to see a display of Bree’s costuming work.
Angela and Jan make a day trip to Port Townsend to spend the afternoon at the summer home of Angela’s ski buddies, Katherine and Norm. We’re there for their annual croquet party.
The day gets off to a slow start at the Edmonds ferry terminal, which is so busy that two ferries go before we can board. Once we reach Port Townsend, Katherine shows us around their place, which sits on a bluff overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
After some lunch, groups are organized to play some croquet. Jan’s family had a croquet set when he was a kid, but he probably hasn’t played for over 40 years. Angela’s never played.
As it happens, croquet is basically the Mario Kart of lawn games: anybody can quickly learn the few rules, and few people have played the game to the point where they’re particularly better than everyone else. Case in point: Katherine’s organized the croquet party, but comes in dead last out of our group of six.
Overall it’s a pleasant way to spend the afternoon.
Angela walks across our neighborhood to drop something off at the house of our friends, the Frazers. She sees a package outside and texts the Frazers about it, they give her a code she can enter to open the front door.
Angela goes inside, kicks off her shoes, drops what she’s carrying, then goes back outside to retrieve the package. When Angela turns the doorknob to go back inside, she discovers the door has relocked itself. She doesn’t remember the code to get back in. The code’s on her phone, which is now on the other side of the locked door — along with her shoes.
She ends up walking barefoot back across our neighborhood to our house. She looks up the code on a different device, gets another pair of shoes, and drives back to resolve everything.
Jan and Bree backpacking trip, Day 1. It was tricky to find a time this summer when the two of us could do our father/daughter backpacking trip, so Jan had to squeeze it in between other trips.
Our destination is Waptus Lake in Alpine Lakes Wilderness, where we’ll stay for two nights. We’ll do a day hike on the middle day to a higher lake.
We stop in the small town of Roslyn for lunch. Today they’re holding their farmer’s market, so the street we want to park on is both blocked off and full of booths and people. We have lunch at Basecamp bookstore, where Bree also picks out a (hardcover!) book to bring on the trip.
We park at the Salmon La Sac trailhead and begin the 8-mile hike to Waptus Lake. It’s in the high 80s this afternoon, and this part of Alpine Lakes on the eastern side of the Cascades is notably drier and dustier. We’re not hiking a long distance, but it takes us a while.
We’re very happy to reach the ford across the Waptus River, as it gives us a nice excuse to wade through the shallow, cool water.
Although it’s a Sunday, all the best sites at the southern end of the lake are taken when we arrive in the late afternoon. We make do with a spot that doesn’t have a great view, but does have a small path down to a small sandy beach of our own. We jump in the lake to cool down and rinse off.
Dinner tonight is a rehydrated “Kathmandu Curry” with added chicken, which turns out quite nice. On this trip, Bree’s takes care of a number of camp tasks like cooking dinner, with an eye toward being able to go backpacking on her own with a friend next summer.
Jan and Bree backpacking trip, Day 2. Today our plan I to make a day hike from Waptus Lake up to the much higher Spade Lake. This is only 4 miles one way, but much of the elevation gain is achieved in a trail that goes straight up a steep mountainside for a long time.
Bree’s in charge of navigation today, following the trail on a downloaded map. The trail crosses over the Pacific Crest Trail, and it’s fun to step on the trail again. From there it’s a long slog up the mountain. One silver lining is that there are huckleberries everywhere, so we pick berries to snack on as we climb. We finally reach beautiful Spade Lake around 1:30.
We find a place where we can scramble down to the lake and dive in. From the water, Jan spots a nice spot for lunch, so after we get out and dry off, we walk a couple of minutes to that spot.
Today’s lunch is a chicken salad wrap — although Jan managed to forget the tortillas back at our camp, so it’s just chicken salad. Overall it’s become clear that he didn’t bring enough food for the trip: Bree can eat more now than in previous years, and Jan was constrained by the size of the bear canister he brought to protect our food. Next time: more snacks, bigger portions.
We nap for a bit in the sun, then read for a while. It’s very nice, but it took us longer than expected to get up here, and the trail is steep enough that it will take us quite a while to get back down again, so we pack up. We also pack out a red sleeping bag someone left behind in a corner of this site — people cast away all kinds of gear that they don’t want to carry out.
Before leaving, we take photos with Lego Bree and Lego Dad. Last time Bree brought them along, she’d said: “Next time, I think I need to switch Lego Dad from black hair to gray hair.” Lego Bree has changed too: she now sports moveable adult legs instead of the fixed, short child legs. Those little Lego minifigs — they grow up so fast!
The descent is as hot and hard as we’d expected, so we have to stop often in the shade. To keep up her energy, Bree plays the opening chapters of the audiobook, “Howl’s Moving Castle” by Diana Wynne Jones, on her phone speaker. This does indeed make the time go by more quickly, and we’re happy when we cross back over the PCT, reach Waptus Lake, and eventually make it back to camp.
Some more sites have opened up today, but we’re too tired to move our camp. We jump in the lake again to rinse off.
We’ve been looking forward to our favorite backpacking dinner all day: pasta bolognese with a side of skillet bread. It’s fantastic as usual.
Jan and Bree backpacking trip, Day 3. After breakfast we break camp and head back towards the trailhead. As we’re leaving the camping area, we pass a stock camp where a group of people are preparing to head out on horses. We say hello to one of the horses.
A short while later, it’s nice to cross the ford again. Today is slightly cooler than the past two days, and at least in the shade the temperature is pleasant.
Bree is working on getting the knack of putting her water bottle back in her pack’s side pocket while keeping the pack on, and finally gets the hang of it.
We reach a nice spot with river access at 11:00. It feels too early to stop for lunch, but too nice to pass by. Jan proposes that we stop here for First Lunch. We’ve got two PB&J wraps to eat, so we split one for First Lunch. We wade around in the river for a while and marvel at how clear it is. We continue, then some time later stop by a creek for Second Lunch (splitting the second wrap).
By now it’s hot again, and the second half of the hike has less tree cover, so we’re pretty hot. We’re very happy when we finally reach the trailhead. There’s a popular swimming hole right by the trailhead, so we stop for a final swim before getting back in the car.
As we pass back through Roslyn, we stop at the Roslyn Candy Company for ice cream. A sign in front of the old-timey candy store reads “Candy Chocolate Ice Cream”. Bree’s concerned that the sign represents a single sugary item, but this is an incorrect reading. We both get milkshakes and they’re great.
Jan’s Erie Canal Bike Trip, departure. My brother Chris and I head to upstate New York for a 360+ mile bike trip along the Erie Canalway Trail. Chris selected this route because it appears to be the longest protected bike path in the United States. The trail was completed in 2020, and follows the general path of the Erie Canal. In some places the bike trail follows the path of the original (1800s) canal, traveling on the towpath used by the mules that pulled the canal barges on the original canal. In other places, the bike trail follows the somewhat more recent (1900s) barge canal that’s still used by pleasure boats today. We’ll start in the city of Buffalo and bike the whole trail to the other end in Albany.
We meet in O’Hare, and have time for tasty sandwiches at Tortas Fronteras before our flight to Buffalo. On the way into the city, we stop at a sporting goods store so Chris can shop for biking rain pants – the forecast calls for some rain this week, and while Chris has brought a rain jacket, it might be nice to have pants as well. Sadly, the huge store has nothing worthwhile.
We’ll be staying at AirBnBs most of the nights on this trip, and our first is in Buffalo’s Allentown neighborhood. Since we’re in Buffalo, we go out for chicken wings at the well-reviewed Gabriel’s Gate; the wings are quite good. On the way back to the apartment we stop at a bodega to pick up some snacks for the bike trail.
Jan’s Erie Canal Bike Trip, Day 1. Today Chris and I start riding! We pack up and walk to the nearby Five Points district and the Five Points Bakery, which Chris’ partner Julie recommended. From there we go to Campus WheelWorks, a bike shop on the waterfront where Chris has arranged for us to rent bikes for the trip. The shop outfits bikes specifically for riding this trail, including fat tires for the trail’s unpaved sections.
We add our bike lights, phone mounts, and pannier bags to the bikes, then take the bikes for a quick spin to make sure everything’s in working order. The bike shop happens to sit directly on the Erie Canalway Trail, but we want to bike the entire trail so we head for the start of trail a couple miles away in downtown Buffalo. We’ll need to average about 45 miles/day on the trail (plus more to get to food and lodgings), but today we actually need to do well over 50 miles.
The start of the trip isn’t particularly auspicious. Just as we leave the bike store, it starts to rain. A few minutes later, we hit a trail closure that necessitates a substantial detour through a neighborhood.
We finally reach the plaque that marks where the western end of the original Erie Canal reached Lake Erie. There’s a small vestige of the canal there, but it’s blocked off and clearly no longer used.
While planning the route, Chris used Atlas Obscura to find various curiosities we can see along the way. The first of these is just a minute from the start of the trail: a statue of “Shark Girl” by a local artist.
We follow the trail for a bit until we hit the same trail closure as before, then make another detour until we rejoin the trail and make our way past the bike shop. Now we’re finally biking the train in earnest.
The rain finally lets up. We make a brief stop to check out a crew boathouse designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, then continue north. We begin moving inland along Tonawanda Creek, still part of the active barge canal. The trail is well-paved and clearly marked, so we make good progress and leave Buffalo behind.
At lunchtime we stop at a sausage house called Old Man River. This looks like the kind of place that teens get stuck working at over the summer, and indeed we’re served by a bored teen. “How’s your day?” I ask. “Boring”, she says.
After following the river further, we eventually come to the man-made barge canal. This part of the bike trail is nice but there are very few people.
In the middle of the afternoon we come to the hamlet of Pendleton. There’s a large ice cream joint right by the trail called Uncle G’s – we pull over. Like many places in this area, it has an order window on the side next to a large menu of flavors and offerings. A malted vanilla milkshake tastes great.
It rains again, but at least it’s warm. We reach the town of Lockport. (Many inland towns settled along the canal included a “port” in their name to celebrate their trading status.) We stop at a nice museum about the canal, where a garrulous museum employee leads us up to the museum’s movie theater. When the movie starts, the narrator appears to be the same employee that just let us in. The movie’s history is interesting, but includes a hokey part where we’re asked to enter an adjacent room that simulates (very loosely) the experience of riding a boat through a canal lock.
From the museum we walk across a parking lot to reach Lockport’s impressive set of locks. There are two sets side-by-side – one for the narrow original canal, one for the wider barge canal – that make a giant staircase. We walk all the way down to the bottom and back up. When we get back on our bikes, the trail actually takes us down a ramp alongside the locks all the way to the bottom again.
From there the trail’s paved surface changes to packed stone dust, which we’ll discover is quite common in trail sections away from towns. We reach another trail closure that forces a detour along country roads through farm country.
At the end of the afternoon we reach the town of Medina. Including our detours, we’ve come 58 miles today – my longest day on a bike yet. We’re staying in a nondescript house a few blocks from the town’s main street. It’s far enough away that we have to get back on the bikes to get to the restaurant where we have a dinner reservation. The food’s fine, although we’re right across from a distracting live piano player.
Jan’s Erie Canal Bike Trip, Day 2. Chris and I pack up and bike into town for coffee and bagels at The Coffee Pot. As we head back towards the Erie Canalway Trail, we stop at the Kwik Fill mart for snacks. There’s an outdoor spin class in the empty lot across the street, with people on stationary bikes pumping their arms in the air to the sound of blasting music.
It’s partly cloudy this morning — a perfect temperature for riding. The trail is mostly along the north side of canal, so heading east we’ve got the canal on our right and a row of trees and lush vegetation on our left, with a long towpath trail extending out before us as far as we can see. Riding this trail is like riding through a very narrow 300+ mile-long park.
We stop at Brockport for lunch at Barber’s Grill & Tap Room. Brockport is hosting its annual arts festival, so Main St. is clogged with booths and people. A loud, terrible band is playing loud, terrible music. The grill’s “Balboa” sandwiches are huge so we split one.
Passing through Spencerport, we stop for milkshakes at Vics.
We eventually reach the city of Rochester, where the canal intersects with the Genesee River. We break away from the trail to follow the river into the center of Rochester, eventually reaching the Strong Museum of Play. The museum includes a large exhibit of old toys. We find some interesting original Lego sets that are only a little more primitive than the ones we first played with. I’m amused by an exhibit dedicated to the video game, “Age of Empires”, and still remember many of the game’s sound cues. In a glass case Chris spots an old Star Trek play set (“Star Trek USS Enterprise Action Playset with Spin Transporter” by Mego). This is the first time he’s ever seen an object in a museum that he himself has owned. The set looks very cheap, but both of us remember it fondly. Further along we see a set of Jarts: large and stupidly dangerous lawn darts. We remember those fondly as well.
We bike out of Rochester and continue to the suburb of Pittsford. Our AirBnB tonight is a basement unit under a 1960s style house. The host, Suzanne, want to show us through all the aspects of the basement apartment even though everything she says is completely obvious (“And here’s the shower…”).
For dinner we bike to Pittsford’s Main Street, which has what looks like a healthy set of businesses. We go to Fattoush for chicken kebabs and a side of hummus and pita. It turns out that our kebabs already come with hummus and pita, so now we have a giant amount of hummus and pita. Chris takes some to eat tomorrow.
Today we biked 62 miles, the longest I’ve ever biked in a single day.
Jan’s Erie Canal Bike Trip, Day 3. After checking out, Chris and I bike back to Pittsford’s cute row of restaurants alongside the Erie Canal and have breakfast at Simple Crêpes. When we leave, there’s a group of people doing outdoor yoga in a pavilion by the canal.
It’s another cool day and perfect for riding. Many people are out for a jog, a dog walk, or a bike ride on a nice summer Sunday morning. Eventually we get far enough from Pittsford that the people thin out.
We reach the town of Newark, NY, aiming to have lunch at the Canal View Family Restaurant. Although the restaurant does back up to the canal, there’s no view of the canal from inside the restaurant, only from the parking lot in back. It should be called, “Canal View Family Parking Lot”.
We stop in Lyons for milkshakes at Spanky Oliver’s, another ice cream joint staffed by another bored teenager. On the shop’s outside wall, a “Leap of Faith” poster advertises an upcoming “family-friendly” Christian event featuring a motorcycle driver who will leap a line of cars and pass through a wall of flame. Jan sends a photo of this poster to Angela with the suggestion that Community Presbyterian Church in Buckley consider hosting such an event.
At various points on the trail, we pass by inactive sections of the original canal. Some no longer have flowing water, and instead contain stagnant water covered with bright green algae. Some are just marshy areas filled with reeds; those will inevitably turn to forest someday and those traces of the canal will disappear.
Our destination for the day is the small, dying town of Clyde. From the looks of some of its large homes or the brick buildings downtown, it must have been a thriving town back when the canal was an active trade conduit. Today many of those old homes look like haunted houses, and the brick buildings downtown are boarded up. Our AirBnB is an apartment above a vape store called Vape Kult. It’s concerning that the keypad unlock code we were given doesn’t work, but we’re eventually able to reach the apartment owner and get the correct code.
Chris goes for a walk in the afternoon, and discovers that there’s only one restaurant in town open on Sundays: a pizza joint called PaPa’s Pizza. He stops in to confirm they’ll be open for dinner, and they say they’ll be open until 6:00. They fail to mention that they actually stop taking pizza orders at 5:30 — which we learn when we try to order a pizza at 5:35. Our pleas for pizza fall on deaf ears, but we eventually convince them to let us order a salad and some fried appetizers that don’t require using the pizza oven. The food is, as expected, entirely uninteresting.
Jan’s Erie Canal Bike Trip, Day 4. The owner of the AirBnB asserts that the best breakfast in the sad town of Clyde can be had at the “Westside Fuel” eatery attached to the nearby Valero gas station. We’re not inclined to doubt him, so bike back westwards to the gas station even though it’s in the wrong direction.
It rains on and off all day. In the mid-morning, the trail leaves the canal and winds along boring, slightly hilly country roads for a while. We pass many shipping container storage lots and wonder why there are so many. After an hour or so of that, we’re happy that the trail rejoins the canal.
We stop at Towpath Pizza in tiny Jordan, NY, for subs and pizza. This place is staffed by a teen girl who seems to actually enjoy her job. A teen boy hangs out for a very long time chatting with her across the register counter.
We eventually enter the outskirts of Syracuse, and have to take a number of pedestrian overpasses over busy highways, including a long overpass near Onondaga Lake. We make a small detour to see the Update Down Stoplight at Tompkins Street & Milton Avenue. The story goes that, when stoplights first came to this region long ago, Irish immigrants in this neighborhood didn’t like that the color red (associated with the British) was above the color green (associated with Ireland). Someone threw a rock to destroy the red light; whenever the red light was replaced, someone would destroy it again. Eventually someone came up with the idea of flipping the traffic signal upside down, and after various bureaucratic twists and turns, the signal received dispensation to keep the upside-down orientation.
We bike to the Marriott hotel where we’ll stay for the next two nights. Downtown Syracuse seems dead, a victim of decades of redlining, the offshoring of manufacturing, misguided “Urban Renewal”, and general mismanagement, all capped off with the pandemic shift to remote work. Very few people are walking around on a Monday afternoon.
There are some restaurants though, including Pastabilities, where we have a tasty meal with portions that are too big.
Jan’s Erie Canal Bike Trip, Day 5. Today we have a rest day, so we’ve got all day to spend in Syracuse. We get bagels for breakfast from Water Street Bagel Co., then make our way to the Museum of Science & Technology. Sadly, the museum is closed today. We still walk around the museum to see its section of the Berlin Wall displayed outside.
Since the science museum is closed, we go all the way back to the bagel shop neighborhood to visit the Erie Canal Museum. This is our second Erie Canal museum of the trip, but it’s interesting in its own right. Among other things, the museum sits on Erie Boulevard, the route of the original canal before it was filled in and paved. The museum building used to be a toll collection station on the canal where they would weigh boats to assess tolls. The museum also hosts an interesting exhibition on the destruction wrought on downtown Syracuse by its practice of redlining.
We get a coffee, then walk to nearby Clinton Square, which used to be a large canal junction at the center of town. Today the square is hosting a small farmer’s market. We get lunch in a food court at an Ethiopian place. The sole employee has a very long conversation on a phone before he eventually gets around to taking our order. The food’s okay, though.
In the afternoon we visit the Rosamond Gifford Zoo. We spend a while at the large elephant area, where the elephants seems pretty happy. It’s a warm day, so we watch them scoop up dirt with their trunks and toss it onto their backs. The nearby tiger exhibit hosts three tigers that take turns chasing each other around.
Dinner’s at The Cider Mill on the edge of town. We’re late for our reservation, but it’s a slow night so not a big deal.
Jan’s Erie Canal Bike Trip, Day 6. We walk to one of the few nearby cafes for breakfast, but a sign on the front reads “Closed until further notice”. We end up eating at the hotel restaurant before packing up and negotiating our bikes from our rooms through the elevators and stairs to the street.
We bike out of the city along Erie Boulevard following the course of the original Erie Canal. The morning passes quickly, and we stop for lunch at Madison Bistro, a farm-to-table restaurant in Wampsville. I don’t read red meat very much anymore, but their farm-to-table pitch convinces me to try their hamburger. It tastes amazing — the best I’ve had in years.
It rains a bit in the afternoon. Like most days, the weather today is warm enough that, even when we get a little wet, it’s not particularly uncomfortable. It’s too warm to wear our rain jackets.
One point of interest for this afternoon is the Erie Canal Village on the outskirts of Rome. This was a re-creation of a small historical village in the days of the Erie Canal. Now, sadly, the place is abandoned. For some reason it was still listed as open in Google Maps, so we submit an update and have the place marked as permanently closed.
We reach Rome in time for our next point of interest at Fort Stanwix in the middle of town. This site was originally a British fort, then later taken over by the Americans and used to successfully defend against a British siege during the Revolutionary War. Apparently this set the British army back enough to contribute to the later American victory at the Battle of Saratoga. The fort was completely dismantled at some point, but today the site holds a large reconstruction. It’s now late in the day, so we only have a bit of time to peek into the various buildings before the fort closes.
We have dinner at Sugarbeets, which is just okay, then dessert at Happy Hour Ice Cream.
Jan’s Erie Canal Bike Trip, Day 7. Breakfast is at Eddie’s Paramount Diner, a classic diner joint with a busy neighborhood clientele.
We get back on the bike trail, now following the course of the Mohawk River. In some places the Erie Canal used the Mohawk; in other places the canal was placed in a channel above the Mohawk so that, in the event of high rains, the excess water could be diverted to the river to avoid damaging the locks.
On the way out of Rome, Chris spots a sign for “CRC Raceway & Hobby”. Chris remembers this business and its owner, Frank, from his long-ago days racing remote-controlled cars. We pull over into the parking lot, and end up talking with two store employees for a bit.
After biking for an hour or so, we stop in Utica for coffee. Back on the trail, we see a small turtle trying to crawl across the path. We stop and Chris moves the turtle to the grass on the side so that it doesn’t get hit.
We stop in the town of Herkimer for lunch at another classic diner called Crazy Otto’s. The town of Herkimer is also home to a small company running boat tours on the Erie Canal. Although we’ve been biking along the canal for many miles, this is our first chance to actually get on the canal itself.
The boat tour is interesting enough as such things go, and includes a passage through a working canal lock, Lock 18, then back again. It’s fun to sit in the boat and watch it drop the 20 feet or so, then go back up on the return journey. The boat captain’s interested in hearing about our bike trip. Businesses in the towns along the canal generally seem very happy to see the influx of tourists on bikes spending money in the towns.
We reach the small and redundantly-named Village of St. Johnsville. Our AirBnB is a small log cabin by the canal. It’s compact but charming. The bathroom has a garden-shed aesthetic including walls of wood and corrugated metal, and the water for the shower flows out of a metal watering can that serves as the shower head.
Dinner at the nearby Repipi Italian restaurant is highly rated online but is in fact only okay. Like many places we’ve stopped at, salads here come undressed with the dressing provided in a small plastic container. The main course of meat and pasta is large but nothing special. It’s dark by the time we head back through town. We stop at a Stewarts Shops mart to get ice cream.
Jan’s Erie Canal Bike Trip, Day 8. It’s humid and going to be hot today. Chris and I get breakfast at the Bridge Street Diner, then make the short ride to rejoin the Erie Canalway Trail.
When we arrive at the small town of Amsterdam, NY, we head to a place called Annie D’s Grill. It’s hard to find because it has no obvious street signage; a local has to point out the blue awning that marks the place. We enter, and can’t tell whether they’re actually open. A woman tells us they’re just setting up for lunch — even though it’s already 12:30. We sit down at a table. No one comes. Occasionally someone walks around at the back of the restaurant, but it’s unclear whether anyone plans to actually take our order or, you know, make food. We eventually get up and leave.
The Riverside Pizza down the street is theoretically open but actually closed. Although we’re trying to avoid fast food chain restaurants, we decide to settle for a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken. When we get there, we discover it’s deceptively named “Kennedy Fried Chicken”. That’s a dirty trick — but it doesn’t matter because that place is also closed. We finally find a restaurant, Fresh Basil, that’s actually open. It’s mostly pizza and wings, but the pizza-by-the-slice looks like it’s been sitting out for a long time. A waitress takes our order but forgets to bring the waters we asked for. Amsterdam just isn’t a place one wants to go to get a bite to eat.
We push on towards today’s destination: the city of Schenectady. Our AirBnB is unimpressive but we’re happy to be done for the day. Instead of biking to get to dinner, we call an Uber. Dinner is at a restaurant called Nest and is pretty good.
We’re now less than 30 miles away from the end of the trail in Albany.
Back at home, Bree finds out that when she arrives at Choate, she’ll be living in the dormitory named McCook — the same dorm Evan lived in during his two years at Choate. Bree will have a single to herself.
Angela takes part in a women’s retreat for Asian Christian Women’s leaders at her old church, Japanese Presbyterian. She is happy to reconnect with old friends, make new ones, and eat amazing Asian foods!
Jan’s Erie Canal Bike Trip, Day 9. Chris has a friend from his Choate days named Eric who lives not far away in a town called Coxsackie. Eric makes the drive up to Schenectady so the three of us can have breakfast together. Eric and Chris haven’t seen each other in a long time, so there’s a lot of catching up to do. We say goodbye and pedal to the edge of town to pick up the bike trail.
In the middle of the morning the trail shifts from the canal to the Mohawk-Hudson Bikeway and cuts across a couple of hills. These feel like the biggest hills of the trip; since most of the ride so far has been along the canal towpath, it’s been almost completely flat to this point. On the plus side, the high hill gives us a nice view of the Mohawk River.
After a long while we eventually reach the Hudson River and a T intersection with the Empire State Trail that runs south-north here between Manhattan and the U.S.-Canada border near Lake Champlain. We take a right and begin riding south along the Hudson. We stop for a coffee and donuts at a Dunkin’ Donuts, then finish up the last few miles of the trail.
The trail ends where the original Erie Canal used to enter the Hudson River. The canal still appears on Google Maps, but in reality it’s been completely filled in. The huge Interstate 787 highway passes overhead. The only sign that we’re in the right place is a plaque marking the original canal terminus. We take a few photos to celebrate.
We still have a couple more miles to ride to reach the Amtrak station in city of Rensselaer on the east side of the Hudson. We’re taking a train back to Buffalo so we can return the rental bikes. Now that we’ve left the well-marked Erie Canalway Trail behind, we have to contend with some confusing bike signage. At one point it takes us a while to work out that we’re supposed to ride our bikes up a thin lane between some concrete barriers along an I-787 offramp.
We get to the Amtrak station and have a quick lunch before we need to board the train. While we’re eating, a train porter spots our bikes and offers to help us get our bikes down to the train platform and onto the train. He’s going to great lengths to be helpful, so it eventually occurs to us that he’s after a tip. The Amtrak train arrives, and we start the processing of getting the bikes on the train. Some of the cars have a single spot for a bike, but it’s awkwardly arranged: we have to remove the front tire from each bike, then hang the bike by the rear tire using a hook that’s not really wide enough for the bike’s fat tires. The whole system seems hard to use.
The train car itself seems like it’s as old as we are. I try to use our car’s bathroom but the door won’t lock properly behind me. When I leave the bathroom and close the door — then the lock finally clicks, and now the door is locked from the inside and no one can use that bathroom. I have to flag down a conductor so he can get the bathroom in service again.
The train journey from Albany takes 5-6 hours, and for much of the trip it’s fun to see that the train parallels the course of the Erie Canal. There are actually four modes of transportation running along the very same route: 1) the canal, 2) the bike path that follows the canal towpath, 3) the train line that followed (and eventually replaced) the canal, and 4) the New York Thruway that followed the canal too (and eventually replaced the train). THere’s often a barrier of trees between the train tracks and the canal, so we can’t see the trail very often, but in a few places we can glimpse the canal and the bike path next to it that we just finished traveling.
When we arrive in Buffalo, we bike to our AirBnB. Tonight’s dinner is at Southern Exposure, a Texas-style barbecue restaurant. I’m rarely excited by barbecue, but the barbecue here is amazing.
Jan’s Erie Canal Bike Trip, return. We pedal our bikes to BreadHive Bakery for bagel breakfast sandwiches, and then ride the last short distance to the waterfront. We get back on the Erie Canalway Trail for a few blocks back to the bike shop, and then the bike trip is over. We walk our bikes into the store, remove all our gear from them, then hand them over to the bike shop employee.
We’ve got a little bit of time to kill before our flight home, so we visit the nearby Buffalo Transportation Pierce Arrow Museum. The museum is loosely focused on the Pierce Arrow company that made bikes, motorcycles, and cars in Buffalo around 1900-1930. It’s interesting to see the variety of forms in the earliest bicycles and motorcycles, when designers were still working out which basic forms worked best. The second half of the museum presents a hodgepodge of different things and so is less interesting.
We catch a ride to the airport for our flight to Chicago, then Chris heads to his flight to Portland and I head to my flight to Seattle.
My flight is unremarkable for the first few hours, then the pilot suddenly announces: “Flight attendants: take your jump seats within one minute.” This is ominous. 60 seconds later, the plane enters a storm and begins to shake hard back-and-forth and up-and-down. This shaking continues for a long, long time. I really hate turbulence, but most of the passengers around me continue scrolling on their phones as if it’s no big deal. After a long time, the pilot gets back on to say: “We should be clear of this in 15 minutes.” The shaking continues but, 15 miserable minutes later, finally stops.
We attend a small gathering in Bellevue of Seattle-area Choate students. Bree reconnects with a senior she’s met before. Jan and Angela speak with other parents about to send their kids off to boarding school.
Evan returns from a summer studying Mandarin in Taiwan. He’ll be at home for a few days before leaving for a Stanford-sponsored seminar. Towards the end of September he’ll return to Stanford for his senior year.
Jan finishes an odd gift for Bree: a small cat push partially stuffed with actual hair from our two cats.
In the spring Bree had expressed concern that, once she leaves home, she’ll no longer be exposed on a daily basis to our cats – which might lead her cat allergies to get worse. This is, in fact, what happened to Jan when he first left home.
To prevent this from happening to Bree, Jan proposed that Bree take some cat hair with her to school. The best container for cat hair would be, obviously, a cat plush toy. He obtained a small plush toy of the cat Pusheen, and spent this summer brushing our cats to collect their hair.
Today he removes some of the stuffing from Pusheen and fills the space with the collected cat hair. Bree shows him how to do an “invisible” stitch, or ladder stitch, to sew up the incision.
The result is cute and almost immediately begins shedding bits of cat hair as feared/planned/expected/hoped. Ideally the modified Pusheen will help Bree stay only mildly allergic to our cats while she’s away!
Liya turns 21! She’s wrapped up her summer work at the Yale virus lab, and is now getting ready for the fall term of her senior year. She and her friend Jordan both have birthdays around the same time, and will celebrate with a birthday party in two days.
We leave for a flight to the East Coast to drop Bree off at Choate for her junior year. She’s spent the past week packing and getting together with friends for excited but tearful goodbyes.
She says a final goodbye to Moxie and Mojo, whom she will miss very much. The parting is made a little lighter by the fact that, to keep the cats inside while we load the car, we’ve quarantined Mojo inside Jan’s office and Moxie inside the bathroom. Mojo just looks puzzled, but while we were loading the car, Moxie decided that the best place to wait was to lie inside the bathroom sink – it’s pretty cute.
We fly to Newark, then drive up to New Haven. We get there fairly late, but make a detour on the way to the hotel to stop by the apartment Liya is renting with her friends Jordan and Victoria. Liya has agreed to act as the recipient for a bunch of things for Bree that we’d ordered or mailed ahead, so Liya’s accumulated a sizable pile of boxes for Bree.