the Way of the Turtle

ERIE CANALWAY TRAIL END-TO-END:
Progress So Far...
Wednesday, October 12, 2016

A couple of years ago I started thinking that I wanted to mark turning 50 by riding the Erie Canalway Trail from end to end. The obvious way to do this would be to sign up for the Cycling the Erie Canal tour that Parks & Trails NY organizes every July... except the price for that is more than I would want to pay, and I can best be described as a not terribly social animal... so spending an entire week with other riders doesn't appeal. Instead, I figured I'd take a week and do it on my own, probably with some support from Ann.

Problem was, that would mean spending a week doing very little other than riding my bike, and as my experience with the Maine Lighthouse Century showed, while I enjoy riding my bike, I don't love riding my bike, especially not enough to give up running and so on for the better part of a week. So I abandoned that plan.

Except this summer I found myself riding more of the Canalway Trail again, and got me thinking - instead of doing it all at once, why not break it up into a bunch of shorter trips? Thus was born my two year plan - ride the Trail in segments over the next two years. And I think I made pretty good progress, considering that the idea only became official in my head sometime in July.

To date I've ridden a little over 215 miles of what PTNY says is the 360 mile trail (the summer tour is closer to 400 miles, and that's most likely the guidelines I'll follow.) My two longest segments are from Hulberton (west of Brockport) to Newark (62+ miles) and from Minden (west of Canajoharie) to the Albany waterfront (82+ miles) but I've also ridden the entire Old Erie Canal State Historic Park plus the section through Rome (43+ miles), Oriskany to Utica (15 miles), and Weedsport to Warners (12+ miles.)

It's hard to say if I'll get much more done this year... it all depends on the weather. I've also got some of the toughest stretches still to do - on-road treks from Newark to Port Byron, Camillus to DeWitt, and Utica to Little Falls. But it's definitely do-able by the end of 2017.

JMH