Bikes, Boats and Automobiles: Cycling the Erie Canal 2024 (Part 3)

Cycle the Erie Canal Day 6 was a Car SAG day for me. A driving day seems an appropriate way to start the third and final installment of this series, one which will touch more on vehicles and machinery than have the previous two chapters. This isn’t particularly by design but rather just how things turn out.

The general concept of “things turning out” was largely how this trip unfolded, and naturally (should you ask me) one of its best attributes.

If you’ve just found this series and want to get caught up on the story, here are links to Part 1 and Part 2 of the tale.

We Like Math

After our morning SAG (Support and Gear) meeting we hit the road to attend to the various flagging and driving tasks.

As usual, I passed a number of businesses and locations where the signs were intriguing and therefore demanded further research. For example, this used car lot’s slogan (I have later found by looking them up) is “Our Cars Cheaper Than Hamburger” [sic]. Aside from begging for some punctuation if not another word (Can I please buy a verb?), what the “Cars by the Pound” slogan doesn’t fully disclose is that the price per pound varies from car to car. Currently advertised is a 2015 Dodge Journey for $3.29/lb as well as a 2014 Ram 1500 truck for $2.49/lb. I guess when business is slow, the lot’s owners simply like doing math as I’m not sure that there’s any other advantage to this per pound pricing thing.

No advantage other than the fact that it got me to look. Which I guess is point enough.

Send More Flaggers

Most of the day’s work for me involved a pretty gnarly intersection – pictured in the lede photo – that ran 4 lanes of uphill highway over a big railroad overpass with the bike trail cutting across for maybe 300′ at a 45 degree angle. This particularly bike-unfriendly exchange required cyclists to either ride longer to get to a crosswalk or to brave cutting across same-direction traffic uphill to reach the left turn lane. As you might guess, many opted for the less safe but shorter route of cutting across the highway, with high speed traffic coming up behind. Anything approaching safety here required 3 flaggers — one to warn the cyclists entering the situation (and to try to encourage them to take the longer ride to the crosswalk), another to warn traffic coming up the hill behind the cyclists who chose the left turn lane, and another to control opposite direction traffic as cyclists turned left or crossed the crosswalk.

Ugh.

Some Patriots Get Monuments, Others Get Not Very Accurate Corvettes

During some of my afternoon driving, I discovered Oriskany Battlefield monument, marking the place of one of the turning point battles in the Revolutionary War. Actions at Oriskany in the summer of 1777 ultimately started a rout of the British and their allies which in turn thwarted their plan to occupy the Hudson Valley and sever New England from the southern colonies. On the cycle tour route, Oriskany was between Rome and Utica and a number of tour participants got off the trail to view the monument and battleground.

 

Camp on Day 6 was at Fort Plain, NY, which that evening offered clearing skies (after a day of heavy overcast and wet-towel level humidity) and a carnival right where the Empire State Trail emerged into town. As I sat in my SAG car waiting to scoop up collapsing riders, I had the opportunity to consider the carnival’s kiddie car ride.

I am fascinated by the design of carnival kiddie cars (and kids’ cars in general as evidenced by last week’s discussion of the Browniekar). In the case of carnival ride cars, I probably give too much thought as to what actual cars these things are patterned upon. I have found, as I did in Fort Plain, that first generation Mustangs and Corvettes are usual favorites. Not that the kiddies of course know anything about the cars, but I suppose there’s some effort being made to be attractive to to the adults who bring the kids.  For their part, the kids are fully entertained by twisting back and forth on the inert steering wheels, and they seldom question how a car with 4 steering wheels could possibly work.

I enjoyed the Hello Kitty-themed Mustang.

I also enjoyed the Tom Brady-honoring Corvette Stingray kind of thing. I suppose this needs to be duly noted by someone who lives in Massachusetts. This one is oddly off by a year for the Patriots’ Super Bowl victories, and seems to end a couple of victories short (if you count the last, non-Patriots win).  Maybe Gisele controls the rights to the post-2015 Brady-tribute kiddie cars.

I kind of hope so.

Then again, this whole situation (yes, it is a “situation”) is very aligned with my basic point about carnival kiddie cars. They’re kind of close to reality, but not quite there. It’s sort of as if they were created by aliens who have studied our civilization but who sadly did not get it quite right…or alternatively maybe we have not quite understood their intentions.

Since the tour was getting down to the wire so far as the number of evenings left, it was appropriate that the organizers pulled out all of the stops in Fort Plain for dinner. A local barbecue company spent the afternoon creating a poultrypocalypse for the riders.

Day 7, The Best Day Yet: Old Engines, Bikes and Cars

The next morning provided a beautifully foggy start to the day from our overnight camp at a classic early 1960s public school building.

I love the tall brick chimneys that these buildings typically have and hold them in much higher regard than the more modern attempts at school architecture. The difference is stark. 60 years ago, American school buildings looked like factories for producing citizens. And that’s pretty much what they did. More recently constructed schools, with their peaked-roof atriums, are intended to represent gardens or greenhouses where theoretically anything might grow.

Once again, material culture accurately reflects the prevailing social attitudes and beliefs of its time.

I found that my Day 7 ride was one of the best of the tour. This was enhanced by the fact that the camp in Fort Plain was virtually on top of a mountain, so the winding uphill streets on which I had spent the previous afternoon rescuing very tired riders was a glorious downhill for me first thing in the morning. Afterwards, it was literally pretty much all gradually downhill for the rest of the day.

This day included a relatively long — 16 mile — transit on the canalway trail (towpath). Even though the overall trip was 300 miles on the canal, there were often many diversions onto roads which made the total canal riding seem somewhat less.

That 16 mile stretch of Canalway brought us to the Schoharie Crossing State Historic Site for our am rest stop, which as (my) luck would have it was hosting the 46th Annual Old Engine and Tractor Show that weekend. This also event featured music and food, but I suspect that neither of those things were much of a draw for the intended attendees and participants.

Nope. This show was all about these 100+ year old, single-cylinder, engines.  Many, like the example above, had been set up to run and perform some kind of ostensibly useful task.

A few machines were quite obvious as to their original function. This thing with a giant circular saw blade on it (driven by a 100 year old engine similar to every other one I saw at the show) was clearly some kind of portable sawmill, even though it looked straight out of a Bugs Bunny or Road Runner cartoon (or for you younger folks out there, Itchy and Scratchy here and here).

Hello…OSHA? I just got this thing delivered from Acme…

The show also featured tractors of all sorts. I find tractors to be incredibly interesting machines that I nevertheless know nothing about. This likely comes from an ancient childhood association with derelict tractors (plus a random bulldozer that I never could explain) at my grandmother’s house.

She who had more derelict vehicles at her house than you could shake a stick at.

The most fascinating of these machines seemed to integrate a glass mason jar somehow into the fuel system. I had no idea how any of that worked, but I admired the initiative. It may have been initiative all for naught as that tractor pretty much never ran in all of the years I knew it. Despite all of the cursing and tinkering provided by my uncle on long summer evenings as I stood there holding tools and trying hard not to “touch things”.

Anyhow, I love tractors and was happy to see them here at Schoharie for our morning rest stop.

There was a horse-drawn road grader. This is something I’ve never seen before.

Even older tractors. What this one needs is a soup can on top of the exhaust just like the one that my grandma had.

This very cool old engine is mostly cool to me due to the fact that it’s from Evansville, Indiana.  Evansville being a town that has been recently discussed in Tom Halter’s post about the cars of his maternal grandparents.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fryvbrGdW9w?feature=share

As seen above, the Hercules actually started up and ran. This is unlike some of the other old engines, that in keeping with machinery over 100 years old simply decided that this day was not a day that they were going to run. Hey, I get it. If I were ever get to be older than sliced bread (1928, thank you Chillicothe, Missouri) I think that I’d only start if I damn well wanted to.

Maybe it was just a coincidence that this day’s Old Engine Show featured a collection of antique bicycles, but that was much appreciated. The Whizzer – actually a conversion kit for non-motorized bikes – has graced these pages before in a great post by Paul covering what I believe is called the Miracle of America Museum. This Whizzer looked to be in tremendous shape and ready for a ride.

The show also included one of these Seiki folding bikes. This one looks like it could have been extracted from the horrors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But it also may have been a post-war example just fallen upon hard times. Hard to tell from the text provided and there was no one around to answer my questions.

The Schoharie crossing is famous for its largely collapsed aqueduct which carried the original Erie Canal over Schoharie Creek. I can’t quite follow the details about this canal feature, but it was one of many places in previous canal iterations where structures were built that carried the canal waterway over other waterways (such as creeks and rivers). In this case, barges were pulled by rope across the aqueduct while their mules and horses were ferried across by boat (in the creek).

Cycling on, the tour next arrived in Amsterdam, NY where the entire downtown had been devoted to the town’s annual car show.

This afforded me the second time in nearly as many weeks to get up close to a 1953 Pontiac. The last time, I was buying shoes for this trip.  Now I have the shoes, so why not another serving of Pontiac?

This time, the subject car was a 2-door Catalina. Not only did the 2-door car look much sportier than its 4-door counterpart, but I also appreciated this shade of green much more than the blue on the one I found in New Hampshire.  This one had no antenna topper, and the owner informed me that the Chief Pontiac hood ornament did indeed light up.

I was able to get inside of this one and photograph the truly resplendent dash and its giant speaker with integrated clock.

This one had 75K on the odometer.  The owner said that he thinks it’s been over and around just once.

Beautiful symmetry.

And great reflectors.

The show was one of those local charity affairs that pretty much allowed any car you wanted to bring. This included a bunch of cars that I cared little about (a number of current year Corvettes, for example). But there were some interesting oddities. Such as this Volvo P1800. I struck up a conversation with the owners by shouting “Just like Irv’s!“. The owners – showing a car that had many fewer miles than Irv’s but still in possession of tremendous amount of personal family fondness — were happy to talk Old Volvo for a while. We made promises to meet up at August’s Swedish Car Day (in Brookline, Massachusetts…Be there and be square, or at least quite rectangular) and perhaps at the Volvo Club of America National Meet this September in Maine.

A very nice Karman Ghia.  Maxwell Smart’s other car — which he only seemed to drive in the credits in season’s 3 and 4, versus the Sunbeam Tiger that he was seen to drive in episodes throughout the series. Rumor has it that the VW was actually 99’s car. Would you believe that there actually are people who discuss such things?

A 1956 Roadmaster. I am/was fascinated by the color, which I believe is called “Tahiti Coral”.  Such a fabulous 1950s color.

I chased down the car’s owner so that I could confirm just what this thing was under the dash. It’s an OEM Kleenex dispenser. Excellent.

Yeah, I’d make garage space for one of these. Or perhaps build a new garage since this would take up all that I have.

Moving on down the trail, it is worth one final note about just how well the State of New York has been able to maintain the vast majority of this trail.  The State of New York and volunteers, that is.

I mentioned earlier that the Erie Canal occupies rivers and lakes at certain points. This is definitely the case for a long stretch of the Mohawk River which was “canalized” during the creation of the latest Canal iteration, the so-called New York State Barge Canal. Integral to using the river as a canal are the eight “movable dams” that have been built so as to create navigable “pools” of water that allow boats to move through locks adjacent to the dams. By raising gates in the bridge-like structure, the dams are removed each fall so as not to be damaged by winter ice and early spring floods. Movable dams on the Mohawk are notable for how they look like highway or railroad bridges from a distance…until you get close and realize that in fact there’s no connecting roadway on either end.

These non-bridges are seen as one drives along the NY State Thruway (I-90) which parallels the Mohawk River and the Empire State Trail between Schenectady and Herkimer, NY. They’re landmarks on that drive, just like the Dellavale Farm barn across the Thruway from the Pattersonville Travel Plaza that looks like a big plaid Aladdin lunchbox.

Remember what I was saying back in Part 2 about job qualifications for historical marker authors? Perhaps graphic design isn’t one of the job qualifications either.

Another random observation supported by 360 miles of travel largely behind people’s houses is that we Americans have an awful lot of motor vehicles (with or without motors) stashed away in our backyards, fields, sheds and pretty much any nook or cranny that might exist as a parking space.

And of course, they all “ran when parked“.

It seems that it would be possible to do the math on this if one wanted to spend enough time combing through registration and production data (and an aerial survey using drones or something might be in order too), but I wonder what the proportion is of cars on the road to cars permanently parked. If my observations of upstate New York are any clue, I’d say that for every 4 cars on the road, there’s at least one permanently parked. I suppose this speaks to just how much space we have in this nation, our relative wealth (all of these cars were purchased at one point, and have now been left to sit forever), and some kind of hoarder neurosis deep in the national psyche.

Or maybe it’s something else. I should know, coming from a gene pool that is strong in the hoarding derelict vehicles department. Nevertheless, more research is recommended.

Beers, Accolades and Accomplishment

The ride from Fort Plain to Niskayuna (which runs mostly along the Mohawk Riv-er), was the last full day of the Cycle the Erie Canal trip.

Camp that last evening was an opportunity for beer, an awards activity and bonhomie all around.

We honored our oldest rider (85) as well as our youngest (8). Honorable mention should go to the mom and dad who pulled their 2 year old in a bike trailer along the entire 360 miles. They promise that he’ll be back riding his own bike in a few years.

I don’t doubt it.

One more beautiful sunset before the next day’s (Day 8) short ride into Albany and across the finish line.

Back in Albany, there was one more conveyance — an elevator — to get me fully back to where I started.  Fortunately just one elevator and not one with stairs a la Maxwell Smart.

After any kind of long trip, I always love coming back to my own car, and finding it where I left it.

The ride home from Albany was quick and thankfully independent of whether I was traveling uphill or downhill.

And that’s it. The end of an epic adventure (and set of CC posts). I’m definitely thinking of repeating this experience next summer. Thanks too to those of you who have in the comments told of similar events that combine cycling with history. The Katy Trail trip in Missouri sounds fantastic, and would allow me to replace “Boats” with “Trains”, which may be even more to my liking. All the better if I can road trip to Missouri to participate.

Several commenters over the past couple of weeks have expressed specific interest in the Erie Canal trip.  Registration for next year’s trip should be opening during the fall, so check the Parks & Trails New York site for that. And if you do wind up riding next July, I might be the guy giving you a thumbs up and waving a big orange flag at you on the outskirts of Weedsport.