We awoke to a calm and beautiful morning, with temps already in the mid-60s. The noise in the marina quieted down significantly last night (presumably from all of the baby boomer boaters like us who poop out by 9:00 PM) and we got a good night’s rest. Our first task was to provision the boat while we still had our truck, so it was off to Wegmans Foods, a large east coast grocery chain. As we were leaving the store, the sky was clouding up and the temperature was falling, evidence of an approaching front, and rain was indeed forecast for later in the day. We stowed our new supplies aboard Dragonfly, then went to the airport to pick up our daughter, Amy, who is borrowing our truck for the summer. Amy was on her last leg of consecutive flights from Tahiti to Los Angeles to Boston to Buffalo and arrived ahead of schedule and in good spirits. I’ve always envied people who can sleep on airplanes. We had a quick lunch together at Charlie’s Boat Yard, and finished our outdoor meal on the deck just as the first of the rain was moving in. We said goodbye to Amy after an all-too-short visit and she drove east towards her summer job on the coast of Maine.
After Amy departed, it rained for several hours, so we holed up in the boat’s cabin and read, crocheted (Kathleen) and napped (Tony). About 4:30 PM, the rain stopped, the skies cleared and it was a beautiful day again, so we decided to get out the folding bikes and do some more sightseeing. Buffalo is criss-crossed with bike paths and it was easy to go straight from our dock into downtown. Our first stop was the Buffalo and Erie County Naval and Military Park, an impressive collection of four decommissioned Navy vessels and other military memorials. Afloat in the harbor and available for tours are the destroyer USS The Sullivans, light cruiser USS Little Rock, submarine USS Croaker, and patrol craft PTF-17. Also on display is the sail of the submarine USS Boston, which was a sister ship to the two Los Angeles-class nuclear submarines that Tony served aboard (USS Jacksonville and USS Omaha).
The USS The Sullivans was named after five brothers from Waterloo, IA, who perished together aboard the USS Juneau when it was sunk by a Japanese submarine at the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942. It was the greatest military loss by a single American family in World War II. Contrary to popular belief, this event did not cause the Navy to change their policy regarding family members serving under the same command. Officially, the military discouraged siblings from requesting duty together but never prohibited it.
While we’re on the subject of service member sacrifice and loss, one display at the park particularly moved us. On the lawn in a beautifully landscaped area are 7,300 American flags, one for every veteran who lost their struggle with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) since Memorial Day 2023. That’s 20 Americans per day in the last year who served their country and paid the ultimate price, not on the battlefield but afterwards, and this sobering statistic made us sad and angry about the magnitude and causes of this problem.
Adjacent to the military park is Canalside, a touristy waterfront area built around the original starting place of the Erie Canal. In 1810, New York Governor DeWitt Clinton mocked Buffalo as a village “…with five lawyers and no church,” The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 put Buffalo on the map and started a period of profound economic growth, as well as for many other communities along the canal that prospered once the waterway opened.
We enjoyed some more of Buffalo’s bike paths before heading back to the boat, eating dinner aboard and planning for our departure tomorrow.
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