Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Erie to Hamburg NY - 83 miles - 3,410.9 miles cum






I am glad yesterday was the rest day and not today. It rained the whole day! We started out with a light rain that just got worse. Normally on this route, you can see Lake Erie glistening in the sun and watch the sun rays catch the grape vines but not today. I rode with Meiri and Brian today. We visited four wineries during the course of our day. We also entered The state of New York which leaves us just two more states to go. After the 2nd winery, we were a couple of miles off route. We realized that we could just continue on the road we were on and merge back on route at mile 60. Unfortunately we would miss the Sag. Oh well we decided that wine tasting would make up for the missed snacks. About noon, we came to a little town that had an old fashioned diner so we stopped for lunch. It was very good. We stopped at a couple more wineries as we continued down the Chautauqua Wine Trail. We tasted some very good wines.
We started to really push to get in just as the rain really started to fall. I got my eighth flat going pretty fast down a hill. The bike got a little squirrelly as the tire went flat but no problem. The biggest problem was changing the cold wet tire but I got it done!
The rain continued to fall without any let up, In fact it was the worst as we approached the hotel. At one point, I was in water that was 2 inches deep as it was running down the road. We were soaked!!
Of course we have been lucky so far on the trip as we have had very few rain days. Maybe tomorrow will be different.

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