Hot and humid

August 9, 2021

Today is going to be a hot and humid day. There are hot weather warnings starting at 2 pm through the evening. We get going at our normal time of just before 8 am. The first part of the route continues along the shoreline wine region where we pass many grape vines and small wineries. After 14 miles the route continues on the shore but now goes through small lake resort communities. After another 13 miles we enter the Buffalo area that are suburban areas followed by industrial areas until we reach the downtown area. Ross again does an amazing job of routing us as we mostly follow roads that have bike lanes or bike paths. This has been true for the entire way since Cleveland except for about a half mile in south Buffalo industrial area. We have a bike lane and then it disappears and we are forced to a sidewalk. The sidewalk is garbage strewn and narrow, at one point we have to foot push our bikes under a bridge because the sidewalk is only 3 feet wide. This is some of the worst section of route that we have ridden. After a half mile we reach a beautiful bike path that we followed the rest of the way. Eventually we get to the south bridge onto Grand Island. The way across the bridge is on the sidewalk. Again it is a narrow sidewalk and we ride most of the way slowly. There is a section where the bridge supports narrow the sidewalk. Our bike have our bags attached which makes our profile pretty wide so we foot pedal through these sections. We make it through without incident.

Today was a very hot ride. One good thing about riding in hot weather is that it does not feel that hot while riding. Riding creates a breeze that keeps us cool while riding. Today we took a few more breaks than normal and when we did break we spent as much time as possible in air conditioning. This helped quite a bit and none of us overheated.

We made it to Grand Island , NY. In our wisdom we reserved a camp site at Branches campground a couple days ago. It is a very nice campground with shady sites. However it is still hot out. Two things can make camping miserable, hot weather and mosquitoes. We had both. We endured as best as we could. Normally our defense for mosquitoes is to go in the tent early. But being in the tent was ungodly hot so that defense did not work. Instead we took a walk around the campground. Then we went to bed and laid on top of our sleeping bags and sweated until we fell asleep.

Tomorrow is a very short day as we are going to Niagara Falls to doing a little site seeing.