Schenectady and Albany

At lock 15 where I stayed two nights ago sleep was hard to get. Across the river was a very busy train track. I was sandwiched between that and interstate 90. As I struggled to fall asleep I counted trains instead of sheep. As I finally was dozing off I remembered Rose warned me not to camp here. Middleport where I met Rose and Kim seems so long ago. It was only 6 or 7 days though. The following day I wanted to make it 63 miles to the Waterford visititor center where they allow camping and have showers, fishing and lack of sleep took its toll on my mileage though and I stopped after only 43 at lock 8. There were no trees so I had to use my tent.

I woke up around 1am for some reason. The night was so beautiful I had to get up and enjoy it. After leaving my tent I laid on the picnic table in my sleeping bag looking up at the stars for a while. The sound of fish jumping stirred me enough to leave my warm cocoon on the table and to put on a top water lure to try my luck at night fishing. The moon combined with the distant lights of the locks gave me plenty of light to see by. After only a few cast and with feet wet and cold from the heavy dew, I decided stargazing was more fun and went back to the table. The Mohawk river had a light fog coming off of it glowing silvery white in the moonlight. While it was beautiful it was also soaking everything so I went back into my tent and slept soundly until morning.

Dave and April caught up to me as I was leaving. We have been bumping into each other many times a day. We are all doing the same mileage and ride at the same speeds. I really enjoy there company and stories of other adventures. They hiked the Florida Trail in 2011 I hiked it in 2016. They are definitely an adventurous pair. Today is the last I will see of them on the canal. In Albany they are heading to Buffalo and ill be heading into Massachusetts. I will miss their company. I bet though are paths will cross again somewhere down the road.

I wrecked today. Nothing hurt but my pride. Im a lot more embarrassed then im injured. But I’m going tell you all about because its funny. So on the path in Schenectady we had just got to the top of a pretty long hill. The view was terrific and I pulled off the trail and into the grass to admire it. You could see for miles around. After resting a bit I headed back to the paved trail. The asphalt was built up about 4 inches. Had I seen there was a 4 inch high curb it would not of been a problem but the grass concealed that. I headed through the grass almost paralleling the trail and tried to get onto the pavement. Because I was almost parallel and not straight my wheel would not go up onto it and at approximately 3 mph I fell over. To make matters worse,my shorts have a pocket that gets caught on the front of my bike seat. Often times when I’m getting off the bike I can feel my shorts are caught and I have to unhook them. In this case though I did not have time to unhook them. So when I wrecked, I went one way and my bike and shorts went the other. Of course there had to be people around and to draw even more attention,my bike computer had an siren going off. I was only vaguely aware that it has incident detection where if your involved in a crash it sends out alerts to people on your contact list. I had 30 seconds to figure out how to shut it off before it sent out an s.o.s. I alternated between furiously pushing buttons on it and equally as furiously trying to pull up my shorts which had became tangled and were half off one foot. Thankfully the rest of the way out of Schenectady was downhill and that em-bare-assing mishap was soon forgotten.

Im in the cheapest hotel i could find tonight. For two days now I have been hearing about a big storm. The people who are only out for there daily walks love to make a big deal out of the weather. I appreciate people letting me know especially a few days in advance. I rarely look at the weather because it is what it is. 99% percent of the time it does not affect my plans. Today however I was warned numerous times and was even told I would need an ark not a bicycle because Albany was under a severe storm/flood warning. It certainly was windy. The head wind was so bad at times I has only moving 4 mph. I even had to pedal down hills. Any way the storm is about over now and it really wasn’t that terrible. It stormed and rained about 2 hours. Nothing like what I went through in London Ohio. But taking a shower was worth the price of the room it was great! I haven’t had a shower in 7 days and haven’t even swam anywhere. I got into the shower wearing all my clothes except shoes and I soaped and rinsed each item of clothing before wringing them out. Hopefully they are clean and won’t stink too bad when I put them on in the morning.

Because of resupplieing out of the box of food Dan and Emily brought me in Macedon I was back on budget. This room was 71 dollars . I have about 1.5 days of food left so I need to resupply real soon. I’ll figure out where I’m at with my budget at that point.

I have been 1677 miles. Bike is fine. Still looking for a welding/fabricating shop along the way though.

Instead of going north from here I’m taking a small detour into Massachusetts to visit family. After that I will head northwest and pick up the Empire trail again. Then I will continue north to Maine then down the east coast on the Eastern Greenway Trail to Florida. In St Augustine the Southern tier bike route starts and travels to San Diego. Then up the west coast and to Alaska by the spring!! I should avoid most of the cold weather with this route.