This was a great day of cycling. My only complaint was a 10-15 mile per hour headwind. Oh yes, that and a pair of really tired legs. Thankfully, the road was very flat today. There was just a couple climbs today. The toughest one was long, straight 1 mile climb at 12% grade just before the township of Herkimer.

The weather was vastly improved today. Partly cloudy and mid-70’s for a high temperature. Another nice thing today was that I started riding on New York bicycle route number 5 and that meant wider shoulders and easier navigation.

Between Amsterdam and Utica, bicycle route 5 is the same as highway 5S and it roughly parallels the Mohawk River. After leaving Amsterdam this morning, I rode through two or three small towns. Just typical, small towns similar to the small towns I saw the day before. The difference was that these towns had a very depressing look to them. The roads had dirt and sand on the shoulder (I’ve found most NY shoulders to be pretty clean of debris), there was trash everywhere, there were people just hanging around, and worst of all, there was a vague, unpleasant smell which I assumed was from some kind of local industry.

It wasn’t until I came into the town of Canajoharie that it finally hit me. What I was seeing was the aftermath of flooding. In Canajoharie, I started noticing the piles of trash in front yards, a waterline about 2-3 feet above ground on sides of houses, small puddles of water everywhere, portable pumps running, and a lot of constuction traffic.

Later in the day, as we were doing laundry in Utica, we spoke with the attendant. She said that the road we came in on was closed just a few days ago because of the flooding. This was the first time I was thankful that we weren’t ahead of schedule.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 at 6:11 pm and is filed under The Dream Tour, Bicycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.