22 mile Ride on the Erie Canalway Trail & Rte 31 (Weedsport to Savannah)
Saturday, June 10, 2017
Last summer I decided to try to ride the entire Erie Canalway Trail end-to-end over two years. For a few years I had planned to do the entire trail over the course of a week or so during the summer, but as I thought about that more and more I realized I didn't want to spend a week of my summer doing nothing but riding my bike - which led to my revised plan to riding it one segment at a time. I started recording rides in late June and by the time I logged my last segment of 2016 in early November, I'd ridden just under 220 of the roughly 360 mile trail.
Ann's off with some friends on a white water rafting trip today (a little too adrenaline charged for me, thanks!) so I headed over to Weedsport to log my first new miles for the year. One of the unfortunate realities of the miles I have left is that there are a couple of significant road segments - Newark to Weedsport, Camillus to Dewitt, and Utica to Little Falls. There's also still plenty of off-road riding to do, especially heading out toward Buffalo, but this summer's wrap up definitely includes some of the less pleasant segments of the trail. Other than a very nice 2.5 miles section along the old canal between Weedsport and Port Byron, and a short side trip into the village of Montezuma, everything today was on Rt 31, which thankfully has nice wide shoulders.
Technically I may end up doing a double end-to-end, since almost every ride is an out-and-back. I think the only segment I haven't done both ways is from Brighton to Newark, and I'm thinking about riding that in the reverse direction next Sunday when Ann goes to visit her dad for Father's Day. Then when I finally finish the whole trail I'll be able to say that I've done an end-to-end-to-end.
