Erie Canalway – Day 4 – Lockport to Rochester

The forecast high today was predicted to reach 31 so we decided to be on the road by 7 AM.

We were staying just outside of Lockport with only a short ride from the hotel on roads to get to the trail.

We passed the lovely county office building, and shortly thereafter came to the Flight of Five Locks, located in Lockport. It’s a staircase lock constructed to lift or lower a canal boat over the Niagara escarpment in five stages.

This monument called the Lock Tenders Tribute Monument is a statue of Ira McCoy, a tender, who lived in Lockport from 1859 to 1943. The statues are based on a photo of tenders in 1897. The artist is Susan Geissler, from Youngstown.

The canal has 36 locks. It also has many road bridges that can be lifted and lowered to allow canal boats to move underneath. They are all in very good shape. The paint scheme on some of them is quite interesting.

This bridge is in the raised position.

Most of the day was spent on limestone screening paths, most of which in good shape, but some sections had been repaired with larger gravel and were a bit jarring.

We encounted another closure today, which was not documented on the map or gpx file, and which did not have very good signage, but we did manage to figure it out and it added a little distance.

This is a guard gate and is used to control the flow of water into the canal and to prevent flooding.

There was an extremely rough section of the path in Medina which caused a small piece of Dayle‘s derailler hanger to break off. She can now only use the middle three gears on her cassette so we will be going to a bike store tomorrow morning.

Near Medina, the canal actually goes over the road. I wrote about it here when I was in Rochester last summer. David walked down to look in the tunnel.

There isn’t a lot of agriculture visible from the canal so this field was notable.

We had lunch in Albion at the Village House restaurant as recommended by someone we met on Bank Street, who also gave us bottles of cold water. It was quick and the food was reasonably good.

There wasn’t a lot of shade on the path this morning or afternoon, and the heat continued to increase. At one point, we stopped and put our feet in the water, but it was so warm that it was only moderately cooling.

We met a couple of women from California, who started a ride in Wisconsin and are heading for the Atlantic. They have ridden 900 miles in the last four weeks and are in their early seventies. They are on pedal assist e-bikes.

We were in search of ice cream for quite a while, but there aren’t a lot of amenities visible from the canal path in this area, and there are few to no wayfinding signs. They also don’t post signs telling you the distance you’ve travelled or how far it is to the next place. It’s a bit frustrating. The signage was much better on the P’Tit Train du Nord that Cindy and I rode over two trips to Quebec in 2022 and 2023. I did find VICS (Village Ice Cream Shop in Spencerport) on google maps just a couple hundred metres off the trail. They serve the most generous amount of ice cream for the most reasonable price. It might have been the cheapest food we purchased the whole trip, and was delicious. A local, Don, invited us to sit with him, and told us about riding the trail in years past, and working at Kodak.

I made a couple errors reading the route as we came into Rochester because I was so hot and so tired, but one of them allowed us to see something we otherwise probably would’ve missed which is the Genesee State Park, with a series of matching bridges, which was designed by Richard Olmstead, whose parks and Parkways we saw in Buffalo.

With 6 km remaining, we had to get out onto the roads. Fortunately, on the busiest one, there was a wide urban shoulder. It was very hot and noisy riding at rush-hour through a tangle of wide city streets and interstate highways, but we eventually made it to the Comfort Inn and suites. It was a 118 km day. We were all quite wrecked and were very appreciative that the hotel has a pool which we availed ourselves of almost immediately.

There was only one restaurant within a walk of the hotel, the Cracker Barrel. Cindy was reluctant to go, but given that there were no other options other than ordering Uber eats we did. It turned out we all found something reasonably good on the menu. And David and Dayle and Cindy were carded when they ordered alcohol!

It was Cindy’s birthday and she brought her own candle and lighter for the cake!

Tomorrow we try to find the right derailleur hanger for Dayle’s bike and have it installed, and do some sightseeing around Rochester.