Chapter 9: New York - Upstate Cities

We spent our first night in New York (Friday, 6/14) in Albany and planned to spend the next morning seeing a few sights. We left our gear with our Warm Shower hosts and bicycled to the Empire State Plaza where we found the state offices, State Museum, and the State House. There was so much to see that morning turned into afternoon  and we didn't get on the road until four o'clock.

The State House sits on one end of the plaza, the State Museum on the other. This photo is looking directly at the State House. On either side are towers holding the state offices.

This staircase is only one of the many architectural wonders inside the State House, built with revenue from the Erie Canal. Wandering through it would make anyone want to run for office.

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An entire world lives underground below the Empire State Plaza, allowing state workers to get from bulding to building without going outside. On a Saturday morning it was deserted.

The plaza serves as an art gallery for a collection of contemporary art.

Just inside the entry to the State Museum was an entire wall devoted to four life-size photos of women demonstrating for their rights. Check out the banner that says, "All this is the natural consquence of teaching girls to read."

It's time for more statues of great women. This one will be coming to Central Park in 2020, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. You can find the location below and go see it.

The State Museum also had an exhibit on the history of the Erie Canal, which was where we began learning how little we actually knew about it. Then there was a sobering exhibit on 9/11, with artifacts from the destroyed towers, including steel girders and a fire engine, and a video of an interview with one of the surviving first responders.

It was time we got going but I had to stop in at the exhibit of a commuter train from the last century. When I stepped into the train, it felt like I'd been there before, a piece of memory from my childhood getting tickled.

I was born in New York City and my family moved to the suburbs on Long Island when I was two years old. Even after we moved away when I was nine, we maintained strong ties to the city, as we had grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins living there. Some distant relatives still do. But the part of New York where Rob and I ventured on this trip was entirely new, almost a different country. We called it "Upstate" in my family. It was strange to hear my part of New York referred to as "Downstate" by someone on this trip, even though it made perfect sense. I guess we New Yorkers thought our part of the state was the center of the universe.

Our route took us through or around a number of "upstate" cities. We stopped at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, noted for its architecture and contemporary art. The architecture was interesting, the selection of art not so much.

When I realized that my front tire was in need of a replacement, we went hunting for a bike shop along our route in the city of Utica. Our search took us through and past downtown into a sketchy neighborhood. Outside the shop, on the sidewalk in the hot sun, a middle-aged man was working on a bike. "Are you the owner?" I asked.

"He's inside," he said.

I looked inside while Rob waited outside with our bikes. The street was rundown and it didn't really feel like we belonged there. This was not a neighborhood where people took off for long adventures on expensive bikes.

I didn't see anyone inside the small shop, just two rows of used bikes piled one on top of the other with a narrow aisle in between. I went back outside.

"He's not there?" the man working on the bike said. He got up and asked what I needed. I told him I needed a tire and gave him the size. He went inside and found his way to a corner of the store behind a counter under the stack of bikes. Not surprisingly he didn't have the tire I needed.

On our way out of the city I wanted to stop in at the historic train station. We had to negotiate significant road construction to find it. It was hot and there was only a bench outside in the sun. We took turns going inside to check it out, use the restroom and fill water bottles.  It was a beautiful building but probably not worth the effort it took to find it. Then we struggled to find our way out of the city.

After that, we decided to give Rochester a pass. I was looking forward to seeing Buffalo, given the description in our guidebook, but the ride into the city was so awful that when we saw the signs for the bridge to Canada, we headed there directly.

In the end it was the Erie Canal and its history, the countryside and waterways, the fun cycling, the people we met, and some of the small towns we rode through that we will remember.