The Final Days Back to Boston

Sorry it has taken us 3 months to publish this entry -- time ran away on us. We are officially finished the trip and are now up in Maine working for the summer having a different adventure. We plan on having a follow up/reflections entry about the bike trip and a map route posted sometime soon. Hope you are all doing well! 

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It has been a wonderful trip down the Erie Canal and we have been accompanied by some delightful weather.  Each day we have headed out expecting to encounter rain but we haven't seen a drop. 

On Friday we were fighting a persistent headwind which made biking quite unpleasant.  Instead of grudgingly pushing along we took a shorter day and stopped at a campground in Montezuma, NY. The stay at the campground was just what the doctor ordered.  It had a pool, showers (which we needed quite desperately after biking along a dusty trail) and all the 25 cent ice cream cups that we could eat! The only downside to the campground was that the water tasted strongly like rotten eggs (because of the sulfur) so we ended up buying a bag of ice and melting it for drinking water. We felt so proud of ourselves for thinking of that (I think our college education is starting to show its dividends). 

The next day we continued along the Erie Canal Trail and we tried to make up for some lost time so we biked from 8am to 8pm -- we took some breaks in the day, but it was still a long day in the saddle and our posteriors are not holding up well. 

The Erie Canalway Trail is proving to be everything that we hoped for. Even though it is only paved on certain sections, riding off road for most of the day through beautiful greenery is a quite relaxing experience (in its own strenuous kind of way).  

On Sunday evening we met up with Josh’s parents at a campground along the canal and we camped together for the evening. The next morning Josh’s dad drove the van down the trail a bit and then biked in our direction. It was Memorial Day so we watched a small town parade (with a surprising amount of candy) and then biked towards a town called Amsterdam. There were some foreboding clouds chasing us in the morning but the storm was going southeast and we were going east so we pedaled as fast as we could and we got hit with a few drops but we biked right into blue skies.  After having lunch in a cute roadside stand/diner we continued the rest of the way to the van. We ended up missing the town the car was parked in and biked until the sidewalk ended -- it was only about a 1/2 mile too far but it seemed fitting to stop where we ran out of trail. 

 above: where the sidewalk ended

We decided to head back to Boston with Josh’s parents because our butts are really sore and the weather is looking rainy so we are officially finished the trip. It has been quite the amazing adventure and we want to say thank-you to our family and the many strangers who helped us along the way.  This was a trip that we will never forget!