To Rochester

July 10, 2021

The weather looks to be fine all day, but there’s no real reason to hang around our little motel room so we get an early start again and plan to leave some time to explore Rochester when we arrive there. Conditions are beautiful out, giving us one of the most pleasant days we’ve seen. Humidity is low, temps are moderate, it’s a puffy cloud day. Ideal.

It’s roughly 40 miles to Rochester from here. We could bike back to the canal and ride it the entire way, but that would slow us down considerably. We decide instead to hike straight east from our motel and intersect with the canal path in about 20 miles. This first half of the ride is lovely, riding across an agricultural plateau maybe a hundred feet or so above canal level.

It’s all good, but the best part of the ride is on idyllically named Country House Road. The road is quiet, and for five or ten miles it’s absolutely smooth. It’s just been resurfaced, in an incomplete project so new that the paint strippers haven’t arrived yet.

Biking east from Medina we face a slight climb that carries us up above the valley.

These first 10 or 15 miles are beautiful, elevated enough that we enjoy expansive views across the surrounding farmland.

So is that where grandma sleeps when she comes to visit, I ask the owner when he swings by on his riding mower to chat. No, it’s a playhouse he built for his daughters. We chat a bit more and then each return to our tasks at hand.

We have a winner, in a TKO: Ivy 1, Barn 0.

Looks like this one is slowly going down for the count also.

Rachael’s always wanted to visit Podunk.

Twenty miles into the ride we slowly lose our modest elevation again and drop back down to the canal, intersecting it at Holley. For the next fifteen miles we ride the canal trail, passing one lift bridge or small riverside town after another. The trail is more crowded today unsurprisingly - it’s the weekend and weather is perfect, bringing out bikers, hikers, boaters, fishermen, dog walkers, geese. Everyone is in a good mood, friendly, and enjoying the day. We’ll, everyone is in a good mood except the geese, who silently hiss at us as we bike past.

The road surface the entire way is crushed rock, the same as yesterday. The same smooth, flat, easy riding surface, but it does slow us down a bit - we maintain a speed of maybe ten or eleven mph, when we aren’t stopping to look at something, chat with someone, or listen to the frogs - which happens often.

As we progress eastward, we’re also slowed down by mud puddles - they look just a bit too slick and possibly too deep to bike through safely, so we skirt them as best we can - around their edge of the path or on the bordering grass. After about fifteen miles we’re seeing one about every hundred yards and they seem to be getting larger, spanning the entire trail and bleeding out into the grass. It gets to be enough, so when we find a chance to take it we get off the trail and bike the remaining five miles to Rochester on the streets, delighting in being able to suddenly race along on a smooth, dry surface.

The canal is beautiful today, with an interesting sky reflected in its calm surface. It’s occasionally rippled by the light breeze or a passing wave generator.

Wave generator #1: the outboard motor. It disturbs the stillness in the air as well as the water.

Wave generator #2: the kayak. His slow paddling is responsible for all of the disturbance on the water we see here.

Wave generator #3, a brood of black ducks, makes a very small disturbance.

The Washington Street Lift Bridge, Spencerport.

Susan warned us there would be spots like this along the canal trail.

I’ve seen three of these now, so I did the research. It’s a Guard Gate. It’s purpose: “ This type of gate helps to isolate sections of the canal in case of emergency, such as a break in the canal wall, accident, or extreme high water. They are also used when a section of the canal needs to be drained for maintenance or winter freeze protection.”

Wave generator #3: the bicycle. After about fifteen miles on the trail the puddles started coming at us with more frequency so we returned to the roads for the rest of the ride.

We reach the outskirts of the city about noon and head for the Genesee River to see the famous falls. They’re famous for a good reason - they really are spectacular, and much more so than either of us expected. But I think I’ll stop here now and break out Rochester later. Rains are returning, and we want to get an early start again.

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Ride stats today: 48 miles, 1.000’; for the tour: 1,579 miles, 40,200’

Today's ride: 48 miles (77 km)
Total: 1,579 miles (2,541 km)

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