snapping turtle, wacky road, speeding eBike, cave exploring

September 8, 2022

Roach isn't the kind of person who drinks all evening, then leaves his beer cans scattered all over the park for someone to pick up. No Sir, he was kind enough to leave them all in one spot .

Last night was Thursday, a weeknight warmup for tomorrow and Saturday, I suspect.

I leisurely loaded up and left at 9:45. It was a perfect 68 degrees and ideal for riding this morning.

At one point I stopped to get a snapping turtle off the road. I know it was a snapping turtle because, well, it snapped at me. Bill is right about staying a respectable distance from the front end of those things. A turtle is supposed to be "slow," but that snap was lightning fast! I could tell he didn’t want my help, but I managed to scoot him off the road before a car ran over us.

Referring to Mike Ayling's comment from yesterday ("If a rolling stone gathers no moss those larger turtles don't get around much!"), this guy is clearly gathering no moss. He's scooting all over the place.

local scarecrow... the wig is a nice touch

I took this picture over my shoulder and it’s blurry, but the street sign says Wacky Road

I turned a corner and was a little taken aback by the sign, until I realized that it was for motorists, not bicyclists

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen a single boat going through any of the locks yet. The closest I came was today at Lock 15 when I saw a yacht just leaving. I missed it by about 15 minutes.

The weather, paved trail, and scenery all combined for a really nice ride today. Even the headwind was only a light breeze this morning.

In Little Falls, I stopped on the side of the trail and pulled out my chair for a leisurely lunch, this time a tortilla wrap with individually-wrapped packages of tuna, mayo, salt, and pepper.

Unfortunately, I spilled some of the tuna fish juice onto my sleeping pad. It's a strong smell.

Immediately after I started riding, I pedaled through a beautiful cut right through the rock. It appeared natural, and not created with dynamite, but that seems less likely.... still, who knows?

I wonder how fast the road is moving????

The limestone today is a different texture than yesterday’s… drier and faster. Or, perhaps in my case, less slow.

At one point on the trail today, a guy sped past me on an eBike, going about 25 miles an hour. He blew past me without any kind of alert that he was approaching, missing me by about six inches.

I understand the value of eBikes. They sometimes offer people who would otherwise be unable to exercise the ability to go for a ride, and that’s a good thing. I support that… but sometimes I wonder about speed limitations. In general, most of the people who use eBikes have some type of physical ailment which precludes them from using a regular bike… weakness, knee pain, cardiac issues, etc. It's problematic that many of those same medical issues could prevent a person from being able to safely control a speeding eBike. Additionally, most of the people I see who are using them are older, and therefore more likely to have slower reflexes.

I appear to be transitioning into a curmudgeon. To be clear: eBikes = good, eBikes going too fast = not good. I was pretty annoyed at being nearly clipped.

here's a flower for listening to me rant

The path is shady and mostly flat. I passed a church which had a sign letting bicyclists know they're welcome to stop in, use the restrooms, and refill their water bottles. Probably hoping to refill their souls as well.

I was tooling along, enjoying the scenery, when I realized I missed a turn in Sprakers… at that same church I'd noticed several miles ago. I’m staying with a Warm Showers host tonight and had mindlessly continued along the route instead of making the turn to her house. When I called her she said the fastest route from where I was to her house would be to turn around and retrace my steps. So, I rode an extra 6.5 miles today. It was nice scenery though.

In our previous correspondence she had mentioned (in all caps): “YOU HAVE A LONG HILL TO CLIMB.” She was correct. This is the first real climb I've had during the whole trip. The one on our second day in Lockport was very steep, but too short to count.

This tiny cemetery was about halfway up. Of course I, umm... wasn't tired, I just wanted a picture. Really. There are a lot of very old, very small cemeteries like this dotted all over the landscape. The surrounding rock wall is almost gone.

I had worked up a good sweat by the time I puffed my way to the top of the hill where Janet was waiting for me with her bike. From there we rode together to her house as she educated me about local items of interest.

At this point in the pandemic, I'm still not staying inside at WarmShowers hosts so, after she showed me around the property, I found a nook on the other side of the creek and set my tent up there.

I took some pictures of the waterfall next to her house (the house itself is perched on a granite ledge), but they just don’t do it justice. There’s no perspective so you can’t see the magnitude, but know that it looks like something in a painting. In the Spring I suspect it's even more magnificent with a lot of water cascading down.

Janet prepared shrimp stir fry and Roland, her husband, arrived just about the time it was ready.

Roland has a farm real estate business, but Janet told me earlier that since large corporations have bought up most of the small farms, there isn’t much business. Fortunately, they have some other irons in the fire as well.

Conversation was pleasant. Janet bikes and has traveled through Europe (Latvia, I think, where her relatives are from), and currently helps out on an annual NYC charity ride. She also rides the 11 miles each way to work and back.

Roland talked about his cave exploring and mapping adventures. I thought it would be done with drones and sonar these days (and maybe it is now since he hasn’t been doing it in a while), but he told me that all they used was a compass and an inclinometer to map new passages. His longest was a 7-day trip. Per protocol, they had to shower the day before leaving, not the day of, so that their skin would have time to produce enough oil. Otherwise, the flakes from their skin would interact with the biome.

When eating in caves, they placed something on the ground to catch the crumbs. He reported that on one trip they even packed out their urine…. 55 gallons of it. Bowel movements? You put it in a ziplock bag, which then goes into a foil wrapper, which then goes into a canister.

It’s completely dark, and he described the experiments in which one of the explorers would take off his watch and call in his perceived time to see what would happen with biorhythms. Roland said that according to the three studies they did (informally), the sleep patterns varied wildly at first, then stabilized; the experimenter's was about a 30-hour day.

His descriptions of the caves were meticulous, and he had a few pictures. One section was a 26-acre cavern. Do you need a tent in a cave? Yes, because the beetles crawling around inside can carry dengue fever.

On one of his trips, one of their coworkers fractured his ankle and insisted on going back alone because if someone accompanied him it would slow down the research, so he crawled for 12 hours until he reached the opening.

I learned that they use an oxygen meter to make sure the air is safe. It usually is, which surprised me because they're really far inside. How does the oxygen get there? Most of his trips were in Belize, where they would set up a base at the furthest previously-explored point, then make day trips from there. The gear is similar to cyclists and backpackers, generally light and compact, and his quote from a friend made me laugh at myself as I thought of my own gear: “I have 75 lbs of VERY light gear.”

I mailed a resupply package to myself, but don’t have enough room to pack everything I shipped into my panniers. I anticipated eating more of my meals, but got some takeout at a few places and took advantage of hotel breakfasts, so I still have some of the food I thought would’ve been eaten. Now I’m going to have to figure out what to do with it.

I also had a SineWave USB charger shipped here. This is my first tour with a dynamo hub. The wheel was literally finished the day before I left, and I’m trying it out on this trip. I got one that, in addition to charging a light, will also charge my phone. However, the SineWave USB charger wasn’t available before I left so I had it mailed here.

After spilling the tuna fish juice on my sleeping pad earlier today, the smell of tuna permeated the tent tonight.

distance: 58.1 miles
elevation :+ 1020 feet
total time: 7:04:34
moving time: 5 :10:10
maximum speed: 20.9 mph
average moving speed: 11.2 mph

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Today's ride: 58 miles (93 km)
Total: 315 miles (507 km)

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Gregory GarceauInteresting stuff on cave exploration. Also interesting (and perhaps appropriate) is that you got the picture of Wacky Road.
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