56.6 mi / 4:07:18 time / 13.7 mph avg. / 945 ft. climbing
Staying at Coles Creek State Park

It wasn’t the most pleasant night, with multiple rounds of rain making sleeping difficult, and the concrete tent pad did no favors to side-sleeping Rett’s hips. In the morning it had stopped, but we were still packing up a wet tent. As we drank our coffee, a giant Great Lakes freighter slid by, disconcertingly silent as it created a wake that would only reach our shore once it had left our sight. 

The evil critter to watch out for here is not the raccoon, but the squirrel. In a short time absent from our picnic table, one managed to chew through a ziploc bag and both sides of a bag of Rett’s peanut butter M&Ms. At least he ignored the much less-protected coconut macaroon! 

The terrain continued to get even more rocky, to the point where the road builders kindly started carving out canyons for us to ride through. As much mapping and Google StreetViewing as I do, I had no idea we’d be seeing this type of landscape, and it’s one of the things that makes it feel like we’ve reached somewhere “different”. 

We passed one of many run-down rural properties where the weeds sheltered a variety of automobiles demonstrating the various stages of decomposition. I sagely hypothesized that with land in such low demand here, it was simply more economical to leave a car on your land than to dispose of it elsewhere. And then reality kicked my hypothesis to the curb when it presented one of the many self-storage businesses we’ve seen in the area. Who is using these places? And why? It’s not like anyone is squeezed into a high-rise studio apartment around here! As usual, when traveling with most everything you need strapped to your bike, such excess is baffling. 

We stopped for an early lunch at The Dirty Gringo in Ogdensburg, which has a Walmart, making it easily the biggest town we’ve been in since Skaneateles. Our counter order was taking a long time to be delivered to our table, but we didn’t care much since we were busy using their wifi and charging our devices anyway. I even thought they might have been prioritizing their “regulars”, border patrolman and local police over obvious tourists. When I finally enquired, it turns out our order had just been lost in the shuffle. No big deal. But after it came out, the manager/owner came over and apologized, and comped our entire meal!  I even protested a bit, since it really wasn’t a big deal for us, but he insisted, saying that’s the only way he knows how to run a business. So it was actually the opposite of my suspicion, we got a better deal than the cops! Then when we tasted our food, it became even more obvious why the place was so busy; it was the best meal either of us had had so far. 

We raced and luckily dodged rain much of the way, but a light rain finally caught us just before Waddington. Since the bar we intended to use to wait out the last of the rain system had closed down last year, we instead basically spent an hour hanging out and getting a cheese, cracker, soup, and broccoli dinner (and dessert!) at the IGA grocery. And thanks to phone-accessible radar, by that time I could confidently say we wouldn’t have to endure a second night of wet camping, so Rett was fully on-board. 

We got our 3rd lakefront (oops, it’s actually a river!) site in an almost empty campground. Some crazy winds dried out the wet tent while we got wet with a swim (aka shower) in the lake (er, river!) 

I figured our sunset over Lake Ontario the first night couldn’t be beat, but wow, the sun showing us the direction into Canada tomorrow sure proved that wrong. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 8th, 2016 at 8:00 pm and is filed under 2016 Bike Tour, bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.