Day 44: Victor to Syracuse

June 18, 2023

Another fresh start, but the arm warmers were off within 30 minutes and the gilet a short while after that.

Another pretty ride too, through quiet early Sunday morning fields, suburbs and villages to the Finger Lakes. The roads were smooth with light traffic to start with.

The ‘suburbs’ here differ from those at home. There are miles and miles of spread out detached homes with carefully tended lawns and buildings of quite varied grandeur. Some are little more than dilapidated huts, others extravagantly plush. Adverts we’ve seen feature the size of the frontage. We’ve not seen housing so dense that there would be semis.

We descended down to Geneva and the first SAG in a park on the northern tip of Seneca Lake. By now it was 9 am, so the traffic was picking up, especially as we were in towns. It got a little lumpier too. There were no hills as such, just pronounced undulations.

Pleasant trundling along got me to the second SAG in the car park of an ice cream shop. Made a poor choice of a salty pretzel with cheese sauce. Had to scrape the salt off and the sauce had no flavour. Not the best ice cream either. Barbara gave me half a cheese sandwich, so I was set up for the remaining 31 miles.

The lumpiness continued, supplemented with a couple of distinct small hills.

Came across Ron who’d just fixed a flat, though he’d been unable to find the cause. I rode with him, passing the Erie canal and chatting as we went until he flatted again on the same tyre. It was in terribly worn after 3000 miles but Dana appeared out of nowhere in the van, along with spare tyres, tubes and CO2.

It was just five miles to our hotel in Liverpool. As we rode through town I spotted a restaurant with an open air bar. I rode across the parking lot to investigate and promptly punctured! I was joined by Barbara and then Chad and Spencer, before fixing my tyre. Some struggles removing the wheel on my new bike and more again removing grit and glass from the craters in the rubber. Got it sorted, rode a couple of miles to the hotel and fitted a new tyre from the wagon.

Today's ride: 87 miles (140 km)
Total: 3,130 miles (5,037 km)

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