Erie Canal, Day 1 - Hibiscus Harbor on Cayuga Lake to Seneca Falls

Finally coming back to last month's adventure on the Erie Canal. Day 1, 10/10/2016: As already mentioned in my earlier post about our boat, we got introduced to our boat in the afternoon, and at 3 pm we set out for our first destination, the town of Seneca Falls. This was about an 11 mile leg, starting in the open waters of Cayuga Lake (nice for getting the feel of how the boat handled) and then moving into the Cayuga-Seneca Canal. The first locks we negotiated were CS 2 and 3, kind of fun because it's a double lock with each lock lifting you 24.5 feet - we knew we were going through 2 locks before we got to Seneca Falls but we didn't realize they were linked like that so it was a bit of a surprise when the water stopped bubbling into the first lock chamber and the big doors swung open to reveal the second one. This carries you over the place where the actual falls used to be, and you can read a lot more history on the NY State Canal System site.

I was driving when we got to this one so I did the driving; TQ has a little more motorboat handling experience than me so I was tempted to hand over the helm to him and go handle lines, but I was actually looking at this trip as a good chance to get more experience for myself, and at some point I was going to be driving into my first lock, so heck, I went with it. My approach was not a thing of beauty, this being our first lock we didn't have a sense of the time it would take for the lockmaster to be ready for us, so instead of approaching juussst fast enough to maintain steerage, I drove up to the waiting area and then stopped and then had to do a couple of circles to stay in place. I got better at that as we went along, we did end up a good job of taking turns doing things, which was pretty much what I'd wanted.

We got to Seneca Falls around 5, found ourselves a spot on the town wall, sorted out our storage a little better and then fixed our first dinner on the boat, steak and potatoes and squash.

Here are some photos from the first day. Click on any photo for a slideshow view. 

More moon + gratuitous foliage + return to Gotham Archery + MORE WHALES!

Waning moon in Midwood

Unfortunately it was a very busy week and I was never able to arrange to be somewhere where I could see it near the horizon, which is where the unusual size caused by the closeness of the moon was the most evident, but still pretty, yes?

Nice foliage in Midwood right now.

On Thursday night, TQ and I made our first return to Gotham Archery since my mastectomy. He did great. I felt as weak as a kitten, did improve for a while but by the end of the hour things fell apart. Fun to get back there, though, and I do want to get back to doing this more, I was having fun with it last year!

And for the final topic: The New York Media Boat has now had 3 days in a row of watching whales right off Manhattan. Click here for more photos. Amazing! 

Whale IN THE HUDSON!

Holy cow, this is amazing! Best Urban Wildlife labelled post ever. Thank you Bjoern of the NY Media Boat for sharing! Now I just hope the whale can find its way out again when it's time to continue south.

(Super)Moon Over Manhattan

Still some color in the garden

And now for some Red Hot Chili Peppers!

Aren't they pretty? Courtelyou Road Greenmarket, 11/6. I'd bought some stew veggies at this stand and the peppers grabbed my eye as I was paying. 

Post Election Post. Just This One.

Just gonna copy in something I put up on FB today. I know I don't do politics much anymore (I did that more when I started, that was sort of what the circle of bloggers I started with did, but gradually as there got to be more boating blogs and I got more comfortable with my outdoor-fun-in-NYC niche I did less and less, to where people probably read the "occasional political rants" part of my description and go "Huh?") but I'm going to revert, just for the day...here we go...

note a little later: So here I am trying to keep my chin up, and then I read this.   

I'm not very good at these political posts, but I have so much concern and sadness right now that I thought it might help me to get things off my chest a little bit.

Still absorbing the blow today. I'm not joining in on the I'm-running-away-to-Canada theme, though - this is the situation our country's system has landed us in (thank you electoral college) and now I think the best thing democratic and independent voters can do is stick around and, as Hillary said in her very gracious and brave acceptance speech, keep working to make our voices heard, and fight for what's right. I know this is easy for me to say, as one who has two out of three characteristics of the Trump Trifecta (straight? check. white? check. male? nope.) I will most likely not be feeling the sharpest edges of the new administration's changes (assuming they actually follow through on the promises/threats of the campaign), but I hope that I am ready to have people's backs when they need me.

Regarding the comment about "assuming they..." - I slept fitfully last night, waking up at 2:30 am, and turned on NPR just in time to hear the news that Hillary had conceded (like the true professional she is) and to listen to Trump's acceptance speech. I was actually surprised by how conciliatory his tone was. I can't say pleasantly surprised because I don't believe the man can be trusted to do anything EXCEPT say whatever will get him the most applause - but if I'm right on that, maybe now instead of just playing to the angry white voters that won him this election, he'll change his tune and start playing to ALL OF US. He changed so many of his stances to win this election, his supporters shouldn't be too surprised if he changes again. A sliver of hope for the rest of us. Maybe.

A Pollyanna hope if ever there was one, and I'm not holding my breath for any magical about-face from the guy, but whatever happens, I'm ready to face it. This is our collective mess, I think that our responsibility now as citizens is to try to help clean it up, especially if it all blows up as badly as people fear. The Supreme Court situation is frightening, but at least 2018 is not that far away with an opportunity for at least a partial reset if things aren't working out as gloriously as they're supposed to. And in the meantime, an actual majority can make a lot of noise if we all shout at the same time. Hope we can do it.

Next post - back to the Erie Canal, where our first stop was Seneca Falls, which is why I had this photo that I was so happy to be able to post yesterday. Very important city in the history of women's rights, and I enjoyed visiting. Wish we'd had a little more time to spend there. 

Election Day

I have friends in western NY who are going to vote this morning and then make a trip to pay their respects at Susan B. Anthony's grave. I thought that was a fine idea - obviously I can't join them, but at least I can post this! 

Update, shortly after 9 am - Up early to vote! I ran into a friend who lives downstairs from me on my way out, we walked over together, we got to pet a beautiful Golden Retriever along the way, and we joined the line at our polling place little after 6:30. It was lovely weather for standing outside, the volunteers did a good job of keeping things moving along, and I'd cast my vote and was on my way by 7:30. Not bad at all, about as pleasantly uneventful as you would want it to be. 

More about the Nimble Nomad

Here's a bit of a writeup plus some actual photos of our excellent little 24 foot home for our week on the Erie Canal. Would that be a floater home instead of motor home? :D

No-Name Nomad in her home at Hibiscus Harbor. 

We got there early and didn't want to bother the folks who were getting her ready for us so we just wandered around for a while.

She really does turn out to be nameless - we have friends who own a Nimble Nomad and so have access to owners-only info; in a funny coincidence it turns out that their boat, the Puffin, was hull #127, and this one is hull #128, and she actually doesn't have a name. But she's a fine little boat.

I don't remember exactly how we hit on the idea of an Erie Canal trip for this year's vacation. I think we'd had that on the back burner for a while, maybe since I ran off and paddled the Hudson River Water Trail from Waterford to Brooklyn solo a couple of years ago (TQ would've loved to do that but I had the opportunity to do it in the summertime when he's very tied up at work, plus I'd had this dream of doing that trip solo since before we even started dating) and got home and THEN learned all this cool stuff about the Erie Canal and ended up just kicking myself for starting my trip at the beginning of the canal but not even spending one day exploring it. Boo! That may have been where the idea started and then it may have been my talking about getting a glimpse of a comfy-looking canalboat when I took Amtrack home from Toledo after weather fouled up my Spirit flight home and they weren't going to be able to get me out of Detroit for at least two days that got us back to thinking about it. 

Canal boat. Doesn't it look comfy? I wasn't fast enough to get a shot from the train but we saw a few while we were on the canal and I made up for it! 

One evening over at TQ's, we just got to pipe dreaming about renting one of those, browsing the internet looking for places we could do that. We quickly found a couple of companies, but they looked a little bit expensive for us and were also mostly designed for 2 couples, when we were more interested in something that we could do on our own.

So we were absolutely delighted when we stumbled across the Cruise USA folks, where two people with a reasonable amount of boating experience can rent a Nimble Nomad. I was absolutely tickled that it was this particular boat that we'd be using because I've been enjoying following my aforementioned friends Brian and Karen's adventures aboard their Nomad, Puffin, for years, and it just seemed like a perfect little boat for exploring the Erie Canal. 

I forgot to take pictures inside, but here's a quick sketch of the layout of the boat. I didn't even try to show where the storage is because there were little cabinets tucked in all over the boat. There wasn't anywhere to put your clothing but Cruise-USA had mentioned in the getting-ready instructions that you would want to pack light and use soft-sided luggage, which stowed nicely in a space under the port side settee. The bedding was stored for daytime all rolled up in a bedroll sort of thing that made a very comfortable backrest, we'd both brought books and our normal after-dinner routine was to curl up and read for an hour or so, after which we'd set up the bed, which was also very comfortable - in fact I think one of my favorite mornings was Thursday, when we woke up to the patter of rain on the cabin top and just went back to sleep for a little while. So snug!  

The galley had a one-burner stove, electric when you were on shore power, with an alcohol stove underneath the electric element that you could use while underway. The refrigerator was small but big enough that we didn't end up using the large cooler that was available. The galley also had a microwave and there was a grill out in the aft cockpit, so you had a couple of cooking options, and although we didn't do anything really fancy, we ate perfectly well. Here was my best meal of the trip - King's Hawaiian french toast with real maple syrup, Spanish chorizo sausage, and scrambled eggs. 

TQ pulled off his best meal in Clyde, where the canal-side park had his favorite design of park grill - we went to the local grocery store, got a couple of steaks, picked up charcoal at the hardware store, and then went back to the boat where I packed up brussel sprouts and potatoes with bacon grease in tinfoil packets to go under the coals while he got the fire ready. He did all the cooking and dinner was so good, I forgot to take a picture! 

Nothing particularly exciting about the morning tea and coffee, I just liked the way it looked! 

Back to the day we got the boat - Mark and Holly, who take care of the boats for Cruise USA, had her all ready for us at the time promised, and gave us a good introduction covering everything we needed to know. Cruise USA has had this boat for 10 years and they've done a very nice job of maintaining her. The boat had absolutely everything on board that you would need, and everything was stored in kind of rational places, so pretty much everything we needed, we were able to find. We'd considered getting some boat handling instruction, they can do that for an extra fee if you want, but in the end we'd decided against that and that worked out fine, the boat was very easy to handle and Mark's main piece of advice for docking and locking was "Take it slow", and we did just that and it all went nicely. We did have our less-than-elegant moments, but for the most part I think we did OK. Great fun

TQ took the helm for our departure - 

I went out and waved goodbye to Louise, who'd come to see us off, which was great because otherwise I wouldn't have these pictures of us setting off in this great little boat! Thanks Louise! 

Out onto Cayuga Lake - 

 My first turn at the helm - I'm thinking "Oh, this is going to be fun!"

Erie Canal, here we come! 

Happy Halloween - Fairport NY style!

I was out and about in the East Village tonight, but unfortunately forgot to take my camera, one should always have a camera when strolling about about in the Village on Halloween. Fortunately or unfortunately, there weren't really any costumes that made me really regret that foolish oversight, I think the really crazy costumes were probably more in the West Village, where they have the big Halloween parade. The dance class that I was headed to turned out to be cancelled tonight, and I initially thought I would come home and talk more about that great little cruiser that was our home-away-from-home for a week, but it is still Halloween for a little while so I've decided to go a little out-of-order and switch to Wednesday night in Fairport.

Fairport was the westernmost point suggested in the one-week itineraries, and Dave and Lenore, who were among the Kinja crew in that fabulous USVI sail in January of last year, and they were able to join us for dinner on our night there. Before dinner, they took us for a little local sightseeing, which was really nice, that was really our only sightseeing away from the canal (bikes would definitely have been a good addition to our setup, although I'm not sure where you would put bikes on a Nimble Nomad), and they took us to Powers Farm Market, a local favorite pre-Halloween destination with a gazillion pumpkins and spooooky cornstalk-thatched teepees! They also had a haunted hayride, but we skipped that (too scary? I'm not telling!). The weather didn't feel very Halloweenish, but the atmosphere sure did. Good fun, and if we hadn't already had more food on board than we were possibly going to finish in a week, this would've been a great place to re-stock!

Hope everyone had a very happy Halloween!