Pit Stop in Pittsford Village

Ahoy mateys - KG here giving Tony the night off from blogging.  I'm sitting at a picnic table on the banks of the canal next to Dragonfly, listening to a pretty good 70's/80's cover band playing at the patio across the canal, watching the parade of bikers and walkers strolling on the canal walking path and I'm feeling fine! (I'm trying to figure out if the tambourine player over there is part of the band or an enthusiastic listener which is why I'm not blissed out).

The view from my picnic table.  You might be able to see Tony lounging in the cockpit of the boat setting the route for tomorrow.

We had another lovely day traveling on the Erie Canal today - once again we had LOTS of bridges to pass under, but only one lift bridge right as we left Brockport, because most of the bridges in this section were in Rochester and those were plenty high.  We crossed the Genessee River in Rochester, and then passed through locks 33 and 32 shortly thereafter and that experience really drove home the difference between the lock traffic on the rivers that we experienced last fall and the lock traffic on the canal.  On the rivers, the priority for the locks is the shipping of goods.  On the rivers, we ended up waiting long periods of time as the massive barge trains were locked through and the small recreational boats were the last priority.  The Erie Canal is no longer the conduit for freight from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean so it exists chiefly for recreation.  So, today, instead of waiting for barges of goods to be moved through the locks, we had to wait in the lock while a canal tour boat that had just been locked up on-loaded what appeared to be a school field trip that was behind schedule, and get the safety brief over with so they could exit the canal and we could lock down the other way. The end result was still the same - waiting periods we have no control over - but since the weather was good and we don't have a strict schedule to adhere to it just added to the experience.

This trek across New York on the Erie Canal so far has been incredible.  Many of the things I loved about traveling down the rivers are present here on the canal: the verdant greenery all around, plentiful birdsong, abundant water fowl. (well here instead of the Pelicans we have countless families of Canada Geese with goslings of all sizes everywhere we look).  The difference with the canal is that instead of the wide expanse of the wildlife refuge that we traveled through along the river, the canal is so narrow so you are submerged in the lush greenery and can easily hear the wind rustling the trees and the cacophony of the birds.  I had no idea how beautiful this was and suggest that everyone should take a week and rent a canal boat somewhere along this waterway and experience it.

We also passed through another section of the canal that had to be dug out from rock - you can see the layers the workers had to dig through to make the canal here.  I can't imagine the backbreaking labor.

We ended the day after tying up on the Village of Pittsford Wall, finding our first ice cream of the 2024 journey at the excellent Pittsford Farms Dairy and walking around this lovely village that happens to be the hometown of my 612 Endurance Teammate Sally Centner.

Bonus laugh - from an old New Yorker: