I have no idea where we were when we passed this.
5 June 2017 (posted 14 June 2017)
I've been drinking coffee for four days straight. Today is a dry-out day. The roads are dry too. We're on for a little 21-miler. I've loaded the route into the $500 Piece of Shit, and, of course, it's nowhere to be found when I try to call it up. We're leaving from the house this time.
As we get ready to go, mist passes over Cayuga Lake.
When we're ready to push off, the mist is gone.
The first thing we'll do when we turn off the main road is climb for two and a half miles. We've just begun the slog when Tom stops, and Jack H with him. I'm ahead (because I didn't hike yesterday). They're stopped for a long time. I'm not going back down there. I'll wait here unless I see them turn around. They get going again after about five minutes. I wait for them to catch up.
"What happened?"
"My front derailleur is messed up," Tom says. I should mention that he has a Cannondale Synapse built a year before my first Miss Piggy. "A piece fell off."
We stay on the ridge for a while, heading south, and then descend into a valley. We turn into Robert Treman State Park.
"Is this where you guys were yesterday?"
"Yeah," Jack H says, "But not here." There's a trail map on the other side of a little bridge. He shows me where they'd parked and how far they'd walked to get to the falls.
There is a little waterfall here too. We're not sure it qualifies as a waterfall. It would back home, but up here, it's nothing.
"Man! I can't stop sneezing!" I complain to Jack H.
The climb out of the valley is slow and gentle. Tom has done well by routing us in reverse from the way the local bike club has it.
There's this thing on a barn:
Tom has to reset his GPS every so often. We're up on the ridge again when he does, so I go for one last picture:
Jack H and Dorothy leave while I'm in the shower. Moose and I are next. Tom wants to make one more pass through the house.
It's almost noon now. We'll get lunch on the road somewhere, because the natural food supermarket at the edge of town scares Moose off when he steps inside. I don't blame him. There's only so much tofu and quinoa one needs to see at one time. We end up instead at a Friendly's outside of Binghamton, because that's all there is, and it's as sad and sticky as one would expect. We marvel at the calorie counts on the menu. There's a dessert with almost 3000 calories (meant for sharing), and most of the main meals have more calories in them than I want to eat in most of a day. I stick with a salad, hold the chicken. We'd have been better off with quinoa. Oh well.
With a mere three hours left of drive time, I'm surprisingly awake for a decaffeinated day. The car thermometer reads 70 degrees, but I have goosebumps. And I'm sneezing. And my nose is stuffed. And now the everything that hurt on Friday morning is making retroactive sense.
This is the price I pay for standing barefoot on a Bar Harbor balcony at 4:36 a.m. to watch the sun rise, I guess.
It was worth it. All of the past ten days has been worth it.
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