We’re back in Portland and back to “real life” now, and I’m pretty overwhelmed with the idea of trying to tie our whole amazing three-month trip up into a neat bow here — so instead, here’s a random look at an unexpectedly awesome thing we found: a bike path almost all the way across New York!
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(wow, look at how happy James is to be on a long-distance bike path! heh)
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Almost all our biking in New York (which as you know is a very large state), maybe minus about 30 miles, was on the Empire State Trail: first along the Erie Canal, then the Champlain Canal, and we got off of only to cross over into Vermont. (You will see, if you are a careful looker at the Empire State map, that it’s not all separated bike path — especially the part heading north after the Champlain Canal was on roads — but the Erie Canal part at least was almost all path.)
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(random sweet mural in one of the canal towns:)
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There are many things going for this trail. It’s flat! There are a million turtles! A million neat birds! You’re almost always near water, and also almost always by some sort of cute canal town. There are lots of other cyclists, but also sometimes you feel like you’re the only person in the world. Very rarely do you interact with cars. You bike along a fun part of history that I knew very little about (though my mind did manage to dredge up the Erie Canal song that I learned for some reason as a kiddo, and it stayed stuck in my head for basically all of the 7 or so days we were on the Erie Canal, ha).
Also, it would make a really elegant shorter bike trip if you were in New York and wanted to combine biking with Amtrak: we talked to a few people who had put their bikes on the train from Manhattan to Buffalo, where the trail starts, and then biked all the way back to Manhattan, all on the path.
There are, however, no real trail amenities, so if you need to pee or get more water or something, you’ve gotta go into town and find some business, since there’s nothing along the trail (James and I loved the path, but were frequently asking each other “but where do they expect you to pee???” Certainly some port-a-potties at trailheads wouldn’t be that prohibitive to install?)
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(which made this kind of thing, which was very infrequent, all the more awesome:)
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Anyway. It was a great time. The only sad thing was that it rained on us SO MUCH while we were on the trail, and though the rain was frequently somewhat short-lived, it was absolutely drenching, full of lightning and thunder, so much rain, kind of impossible to bike in sometimes. And since the path is mostly unpaved, it turned the whole thing into kind of a mudpit. We spent a lot of time cleaning our bikes off, only to have them get totally disgusting again 12 hours later. It was also humid enough that nothing really ever dried out between drenchings, so we spend a lot of time feeling a little moldy. But that wasn’t the fault of the path;)
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(it had stopped raining for this picture, but it took a while for the trail lakes to go away, and even more time for the path to stop shooting mud into our drivetrains and all over our stuff)
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So, there’s a random part of cross-country travels for you. Moral of the story is, bike paths are awesome, especially when you can just plug in and follow them across a whole state, and rain is hard when you don’t have time to dry off in between storms.
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(Oh! I didn’t even mention that you can camp at most of the locks along the canal! So that’s pretty great too:) Picture by James)