Got up around 8 am and puttered, with the hostel all to myself. I was told I could stash the bike indoors overnight, and was glad for the extra security. Now I had the chance to lube the chain and to check the tires – and what do you know, the day before I had been riding with my rear tire about 12 lbs under-inflated. Much of the grump and the shimmy was explained!
After a breakfast of a granola bar and the hostel’s coffee, I set out towards Fairport. Towns along that part of the canal come every 5 miles or so: Medina, Knowlesville, Eagle Harbor, Albion, Huberton, Holley, Brockport, Spencerport, Rochester. That last is a city of about three-quarters of a million people, in the midst of hamlets. (Spencerport, for example, has a population of about 3700.) Rochester is big enough that it goes on for several miles by itself along the trail. Then come Pittsford and Fairport. I planned to stop there because it was about 60 miles from Medina, and 60 miles from Seneca Falls, where I had booked a cabin at Cayuga State Park for 2 nights. Seneca Falls wasn’t on the trail proper – it was about 8 miles to the south – but the route there was given semi-official status from “Parks and Trails New York”, who put out the “Cycling the Erie Canal Guidebook” I was using. Between being the town where “It’s a Wonderful Life” was filmed, and the site of the July 1848 Women’s Rights convention, it’s a destination in its own right.
Before I even made it to the first townlet after Medina, I came across some parts of the canal that made my I-was-an-engineer-once draw drop. Check out this picture:
Trees under the canal
On the far right is the canal itself. To the left of that is the path; then a guardrail; then a drop of several dozen feet, enough for trees to grow up to be just about level with the canal. A few hundred yards after that, the canal passes OVER a separate river, so that I could stand with my back to the canal and look DOWN at a waterfall. (Seems that the stream below had too strong a current to be accommodated in the canal, so the engineers of two hundred years ago built an aqueduct (?) to hold the canal and loft it over the stream.)
A waterfall, under the canal
Similarly, about a half mile after that the canal ran over a road. When I took this pic, my back was to the canal; the bike is on the trail; and you can look through the fencing and down to see a pickup truck pass underneath the canal.
Look for the pickup truck between the water bottle and the saddle.
About 12 miles downstream from Medina was Albion, where I got off the trail to get to a convenience store to grab lunch. Then back to the trail, where there were about 10 or 12 docking-places along the waterfront at a municipal park. Each boat tie-off post had an electrical outlet. I hoped for the chance to charge my bike a bit while I sat and had my lunch in the shade of a stream-side gazebo, but the outlets were something I had never seen before:
That’s a 30 amp, 125 volt twist-lock connector. The plug twists into position, so that even if the boat moves some and joggles the power cord, things will stay connected. If you’re planning to make this trip and try to charge along the way, a pigtail that plugs into this on one end and has a “normal” home outlet on the other might be a good investment.
After lunch, I got back on the bike. It was a wonderful sunny day, warm but not too hot, and I was enjoying the scenery and the ride. I got into Holley about 20 miles from the day’s start, and my battery (I had started the day with the older of my two batteries, to see how far I could get with it) was down to one bar of charge. This time, I was able to find a household power outlet dockside, so I charged up while I nibbled a granola bar and watched the canal boats go by.
Each of these port towns has at least one drawbridge. I never saw one that opened in the middle; these all lifted evenly on both ends.
When the bridge is up, the staircase is level with the decking; when it's down, the decking is at street level.
Feeling joy in the day, and having been able to put some extra juice in the battery after I done 54 miles the day before, I pulled out my phone and booked a hotel in Fairport for the night.
The rhythm of stopping at every 2nd or 3rd town continued. Brockport and Adams Basin went by, then I stopped at Spencerport. Another break, another snack. Leaving Spencerport at about 4 pm, I had 20 miles to go to Fairport.
And then, three more miles east, I started to hear a strange sound from the rear of the bike. It wasn’t timed with my pedal stroke, so it wasn’t a pedal hitting the kickstand, but it had a metal-on-metal clunk character to it. It happened more when I was pedaling than when I was coasting. I could go 20 or 30 seconds without it, but then it would come back – and the farther I went, the more often I heard it, and the louder it got. It started to sound like a heavy metal woodpecker back there.
(Insert expletive of your choice here.)
I was looking for a good place to pull over and get a closer view of the problem when the trail left the towpath and headed towards pavement. So on a paved section of trail, I pulled over, took the panniers off, and started investigating. The rear wheel was firmly in the drop-outs, no problem there, but the wheel itself wobbled back and forth when I tugged on it. The front wheel didn’t move side-to-side, but the rear wheel did.
I dug down to the bottom of my saddlebag to get to my tools. (Wrenches are heavy, so I put them at the bottom.) I had everything I needed to get the wheel off, but I didn’t have the extra thin wrench to get to the bearing cone. So: the bike was not going to make it the remaining 17 miles to Fairport. It’s a Sunday night, I’m hundreds of miles from home, what now?
One thing I have with me that is working is my smart phone. From the side of the path, I search for bike shops nearby, then check that I found one that will be open in the morning. Some good luck: there’s a bike shop under two miles away. There’s also a hotel about a mile and a half away – and it’s still close to the bike shop! I put the bike back together, best as I can, and slowly and carefully made for the hotel.