Thursday, December 01, 2016

Erie Canal Day 4 - Fairport to Newark

Rainy-morning breakfast

Eastbound, locks 30 and 29. 17.3 nautical miles.

10/13/16 - The day began with rain, so we slept in and then just lazed in bed for a while enjoying the sound of the rain on the cabin top for a while before we went for our morning ablutions. Back on the boat, TQ asked me what I was thinking of for breakfast and I said "How does French toast, chorizo, and eggs sound?" and surprise, surprise he was OK with that. I even customized our French toast - the grocery store where we'd picked up our provisions had King's Hawaiian dinner rolls, which I of course insisted on getting, and I made my French toast with a couple of those, and TQ's with sourdough (he's lucky, he hasn't got half the sweet tooth I do). Came out delicious! And yes, that's real NY state maple syrup. 

We finally got underway around noon, by which time the rain had mostly stopped. It stayed overcast for a while, but the wind picked up and it gradually turned into yet another lovely day. 


Eastbound now, back where we came from.

Our first stop for the day was at the Mid-Lakes Marina, which Cruise-USA had recommended as a good place to stop for fuel; we'd been told that the fuel gauge was accurate, and it wasn't giving us any cause for concern but we were getting into the range of engine hours at which point we'd been told it was a good idea to refill, so topping off here made sense. The marina manager was a very nice lady, this was not our most graceful docking and she didn't raise so much as an eyebrow, just caught our lines, gave us a friendly greeting, and asked how she could help us today. We got the gas, we also decided to go ahead and pay for a pump-out here (most of the towns have free or very cheap pumpout facilities but we just figured we might as do that too while we were there, one less thing to worry about), I got a few more postcards, and then we headed on our way. Good recommendation.

This turns out to be one of the places where you can rent one of these English-style narrowboats, and they also offered day cruises on the Emita II. Seemed to be a nice operation. 

My journal says "No problems at Lock 30" - I think we may have been a little unnerved by our klutzy docking at the marina because by this time we were fairly comfortable with this procedure, so it's kind of odd I even mentioned it. Went fine though. No particular mention of (or even photos of) Lock 29, I may at this point have been feeling like I had enough lock pictures. 

Another heron. So many herons! 
Old Erie Canal Lock 60 park, with remnants of Erie Canal, version 2. This was cool enough that I'm going to give it its own post, we'd spotted it as we were heading for Fairport the day before but since we were meeting folks there we didn't want to stop; today we had a shorter distance to travel and no particular time we had to be anywhere, so we did.  


We got to Newark a little after 5, went for a little stroll after getting ourselves all sorted out. We met one very friendly local - he was sitting on those steps looking very photogenic, but when I stopped to take a picture of him he came right over to say hello. 

We just wandered around for a while

Came back to find the moon rising - getting closer to full. 

End of another fine day.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

When I saw your breakfast, I thought, "That would make me feel awful all day." Then I realized that with 17.3 miles ahead of you, you're probably burning a few more calories than I am.

I love the heron!

bonnie said...

Oh, goodness, except that it was the motor that was doing all the work!

I would have to call this one of the least active vacations we've ever done. Not quite sedentary, we were moving from place to place, but for most of it we were sitting and watching the scenery go by.

LauraEhlers said...

What an amazing trip. The pics are great and the cruising info worth noting!!