We've arrived in Tonawanda NY, the western gateway to the Erie Canal. Later today we'll motor under a final couple of bridges and make a left onto the Niagara River to Buffalo, just a few miles away. (Turning right onto the Niagara River would take us toward some pretty big waterfalls ...)
Past Syracuse, the Erie Canal is mostly straight and placid and extremely S-L-O-W. It's lined with all variety of canalside homes, many with cute little docks and boat garages and no-wake signs, which meant that Sal the mule probably traveled faster than we could.
Small towns in varying levels of decrepitude pop up every 10-20 miles. Our first stop was Lyons, which was fairly well-groomed but apparently abandoned, with very little street traffic and seemingly no currently functional business establishments. Lyons is known as the site of H.G. Hotchkiss's former peppermint oil empire, but the Peppermint Museum was also closed while we were there. (Ava and Jim swept us off by car 10 miles south to Geneva, on the north shore of Seneca Lake, for a great dinner.)
Next was Fairport and our first lift bridge, which unlike a drawbridge simply rises up as a complete horizontal line to let boats pass under. It needed a whole lot of WD-40 and there was also a nearby train crossing which entailed exuberant whistling late into the night, so these were not our best nights of sleep. But Fairport has a fantastic library, friendly kayak rentals, and a market where on Wednesdays you can buy the best fresh-baked english muffins ever. (Not clear to us whether the muffin-baker works on Wednesdays only or if he bakes something else the other days.)
In Brockport, Felix got a fishing lesson from a local kid (Cooper) and stocked up on reading material at the Lift Bridge Bookstore. (The lift bridges continued - there are 16 of them, and usually a single operator handles 2 or more, so once they let you under one they have to lower the bridge, jump into their car and drive ahead to raise the next one for you.)
Next was Medina, one of my favorites. (Not ONLY because there's a solid free pumpout station and I'm finally confident that our holding tanks are clean, but that was a huge plus!) First of all that's Med-EYE-na, not med-eee-na as in Funky Cold Medina. Most of the town is built out of Medina sandstone, which we're told is also what was used to construct supports for the Brooklyn Bridge. It's another reminder of the deep historical links between this part of the state and NYC. In fact when Governor DeWitt Clinton laid out his vision for what would become the Erie Canal, he explicitly described his intent as the growth and development of the city:
"The city will, in the course of time, become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations and the concentrating point of vast disposable, and accumulating capitals, which will stimulate, enliven, extend and reward the exertions of human labor and ingenuity, in all their processes and exhibitions. And before the revolution of a century, the whole island of Manhattan, covered with inhabitants and replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city."
It really worked!
Medina also has a surprisingly delicious meadery (they also served homemade chocolate bark, we liked the strawberry lavender flavor) and a mind-blowing railroad museum packed with memorabilia and the biggest model train layout I've ever seen.
Plus an escape room. For some reason every town up here has an escape room.