The Erie Canal

We have seen a lot of wonderful sights on our trip across the Erie Canal, but we thought this Volkswagen on top of a tower had to be one of the most memorable. We reached the end of our trip on the Hudson when we saw a sign at a fork in the river that stated to the left was the Erie Canal and to the right was Lake Champlain. We are too tall to go the Lake Champlain route so we turned left and headed into the Erie Canal. Our first stop at Waterford was wonderful as they had all the amenities that we needed, such as electricity hookup, bathrooms, showers and a laundry nearby. The dock was FREE, which is what we all look for as we travel.

The one word that typifies the Erie Canal is “locks” and since we had never done a lock before, the process really scared us. All of the locks in this canal raise you up anywhere from 8’ to 40’. You enter a chamber that has ropes hanging down from the top that you have to get close enough to grab and hang onto while they fill the chamber with water to raise your boat up to the level of the water in the next section of the canal. In our first four days we transited eighteen locks and have become fairly proficient at “locking”. The scariest one was lock 11, where the ropes were shorter than normal and a current or wind was blowing the boat away from the side of the lock and it took all of our strength to keep the boat on the lock wall. We have fenders on all sides of the boat to protect it from the cement walls of the lock that get “yucky” from the water slime and we wear gloves to protect ourselves.

We would like to give you a sense of how this trip affects us emotionally. We don’t want you to think that every day is full of wonderful experiences and that there is no downside to the trip. I guess the word that has typified our emotional response many days is “fear”. Many times we have woken up in the morning with a nauseous stomach because we know we have to face new experiences that day and are not sure we are capable of handling them. We have questioned the
fact of whether we can do this for a year, but we think we may have turned a corner emotionally today. We were going to go to church in Canajoharie, but it started to rain, and we decided to have church on the boat by logging into the podcast of our church’s sermons. The sermon was about how to handle disappointment in our lives as we seek to follow the Lord each day. It really had an impact on how we viewed each day we spend on this trip and allowed us to take the focus off of our capabilities and let God help us through each day. The other word that indicates our emotional status at times is “isolation”. Although we travel with other boats at times, we are alone probably 75% of the time. We are used to having people around us that we know and can interact with and we normally have plans to be with family on a regular basis. We know that this “isolation” is going to be a part of our lives for a long time and we are attempting to make that adjustment and it seems to get a little easier each day.

We toured the Remington Arms factory today and will probably stay here another day as the people are wonderful and it gives us a rest from the daily running through the locks. We have ten days to transit the whole Erie/Oswego waterway so we have a little time to enjoy this area of New York. The one thing we didn’t realize was that the middle of New York is very hilly. We use our bikes to tour all the areas we want to see on land and it feels like we travel uphill both ways when we travel to parks and shopping areas in the towns we visit. We wore out the brakes on our new “WalMart” bikes trying to slow ourselves down coming down the hills. We bought two new sets of pads today so we can bike more safely.

We will visit with you again as we transit the Western section of the Erie Canal and the Oswego Canal that will take us to Lake Ontario. I apologize for the fact that the flow of the words does not always come through in the post the way it is laid out in the creation process. I have tried to put the pictures next to the explanation, but it brings all the pictures in at the top. Maybe someone can help me orient it properly before we get done with the trip.