New York prices.
We left Rome via the Erie Canal trail. It's been raining lately, so the trail was a bit sloppy. Once again team A abandoned the trail for a while, and team S pushed through on the trail. When we finally left the trail for good about a third of the way through today's ride, all of us were glad to be done with it. The trail has been a hoot, and riding it is a great way to find out about the history of NY and the rust belt, but we don't expect to return to the trail again until they finish paving it. It's also nice to be on new roads instead of backtracking along the canal.
New York state doesn't have a whole lot of flat regions, but today we found one. We circled around the bottom half of Oneida Lake and never encountered more than some gently rolling hills.
This flat topography is reflected in the lake itself. Oneida Lake is fairly big (behind only lakes Ontario and Erie in NY in terms of surface area), but it's shallow. The shallow lake heats up more during the summer than the deeper finger lakes to the south. This makes it an ideal body of water for summer boating. We saw lots of recreational boats and lots of vacation homes along the lake shore.
Because there are lots of vacation homes along the lake, there are also lots of eating establishments along the lake. This is where the thorny issue of New York prices arose. After leaving the trail for good, we celebrated by stopping at a Dunkin Donuts. We paid a fairly standard couple of bucks for a large coffee. But a few miles later, we saw this.
Further down the road, we stopped at a diner in Bridgeport for lunch. This was on the menu:
Kerry, being a wisecracker, could not stop from asking the waitress "If it costs $3.69 just to ask about the pies, how much does it cost to get a slice"? None of the rest of us felt any sympathy when she whacked him.
One thing that is absolutely free in NY, and everywhere else, is enjoying the roadside wildflowers.
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