 So we did a thing. Yeah, we've been talking about this forever. Once we started biking regularly and biking further and further every time we biked, like we went from, hey, let's bike 40 miles. That'll be a whole day thing to biking a century almost every weekend that we could during the quarantine. Yeah, it mainly, because I remember when I was commuting and we were biking pretty much every day, a long bike for me was going over across the GWB to New Jersey. So basically, that's about 40 miles. Sometimes we'd go down to Rockaway. That's about 50. So it's like we were starting to expand our range. And we always biked a lot for like the past decade. It's a primary way of us getting around the city. But when the pandemic happened in 2020, you know, a lot of the other stuff we enjoyed was suddenly taken away from us. Like we can't hang out with our friends. We can't go to movies. No film festivals. No museums or fun get-togethers. Like all social interaction that you'd have in a city dried up. So it was basically like the main forms of outlet of energy we had were cooking, which is kind of like a basic thing we had to do just day to day life. And also we started doing a lot of athletics. Like you would run these half marathons, right? I'm pretty much running a marathon every weekend for the first two years of the COVID quarantine. Yeah, he'd like just go by himself and pick not to travel the streets and just kind of run for hours. And then, you know, in the summer, we started just getting on our bike and doing the trailways up through the Bronx and to Yonkers and past. And I remember before this all happened, I used to say, oh, wouldn't it be cool? We could bike to Beacon and stay overnight. And that was like my idea of a huge trip. Like someday I'm going to be good enough to bike to Beacon. Now it sounds funny. Beacon's like 74-ish miles north of here. Like that's an easy ride. It's not. Now I know better. It's not as fun to bike to Beacon because you have to get off the trailway and go along like country roads for a while. And there's certain like mountains and stuff. You don't really have great time crossing. But, you know, when it was 2020, there was a point at which I think we had gone to Territown up past Yonkers. It's like where we're sleepy hollow takes place, basically. And we just happened to hit like 95 miles when we got back home. And so I was like, come on, let's do the first century. So we biked around the neighborhood until Strava said we'd gone 100 miles. We basically like biked up by the river for five miles and went back home. And so that was like, yeah, first century. And we were so accomplished. But then we started doing it. And then we biked to Poughkeepsie and took the train back home. And, you know, we did that a bunch of times. And it got to the point by 2022 where it was kind of like, oh, first century of the year. Let's go. And that was around when I started thinking of my grandfather's birthday. So in 2019, I was back home in Rochester, New York area, where I grew up. And my grandfather was turning 90. And as a big celebration, we decided to get all the family together. And we rented a barge and went up and down the Erie Canal, you know, just kind of slowly eaten dinner and singing songs and partying on a boat. And it was really nice. You know, I hung around with all the aunties and everything and, you know, celebrated my grandfather's long life. And, you know, there was some of the guides who were driving the boat. And this lady was telling me, say, oh, look at that trail over there. You can take that all the way to New York City. And that was when I first realized how, you know, solid the New York State Greenway was and the fact that in recent years, that infrastructure project had been completed and people did this tour. In fact, it was completed in December of 2020. It'd been under construction for like three or four years. So there'd be a segment here and a segment there. And I mean, like look at even our route where we'd go up to the South County Trailway in 2020. I remember they were still working on parts of Van Cortland. Well, our options were either bike a crappy way up and around and then get to the trailway like further upstate or climb a fence and go through the trail that was not officially open yet. That was full of cyclists who were also climbing the fences. People were cutting holes in the fence that were bike sized. It was a whole thing. But like everybody would like share the information. So you'd see like people with bikes going into the woods. You'd be like, ah, ah, that is the way to go. And so everybody, you know, they would just be walking their bikes. And you'd be like, there must be a hole in the fence there. So everybody was just taking this this trail, even though it wasn't completed. And, you know, and then there was one time all the trees fell over during a storm. And, you know, so we were lucky that we picked the right time to get into long distance biking because this magnificent trail across the entire United or entire New York state had just recently been completed. So, yeah, so we just decided to actually plan the trip. And I just took the time off and we felt like we were ready. We didn't. We kind of almost over-trained for this. Like, I think we put this off longer than we could have. We talked about it during the pandemic. After we started doing those rides at the Poughkeepsie periodically, it's like, you always want to kind of push yourself and you're always kind of testing the limits. Like, okay, I did a 20 mile hike. Could I do a 30 mile hike? You know, it was kind of like, you know, and there becomes a point where you kind of is like, well, I don't really want to go beyond this. I don't want to do like these crazy double black diamond jump off a top of a cliff kind of things. But, you know, I do want to improve in skiing. And so we went to Poughkeepsie and then there was always this feeling of, well, what's next? What's beyond this? And we talked about it all summer. And I think part of the reason we started to decide that then was the time was, one, it was getting toward fall. So it was a little cooler. And also we were going to have a memorial at some point for my grandfather who passed away in 2020 and my uncle who passed away in 2021. And so this would be a way to get all the local family together. And so I said, what if we bike out to my parents' house and do this memorial service? And that's basically what we did. Yep. So long story short, our first cycling trip ever. Like literally the first time we ever did a multi-day cycling trip. We just went off on the road and after about a week went 485 miles all the way to your granddad's house outside in the outskirts of Rochester. Yeah. And then collapsed on the line. But I think the biggest thing is you were really the one who put the most planning into it. Well, guys, what did we do to plan this? Well, you found the luggage. The luggage was really important. So let's talk about what we did before we got on the road. Yeah. Well, I would say one, if any of you listening to this think you want to do a long cycling trip and you're worried about it, all I'm going to say like the summary of all this prep work is that we were definitely overprepared in the sense that this was way, way easier than I expected it to be. I expected more three or four times the amount of hassle we actually experienced. Like I expected us to have more mechanical problems. I expected us to be more worn out as fit as we are. I wasn't sure how we'd do on the fourth day of biking between 70 and 80 miles a day. I thought my legs were going to be wrecked. And it turned out, I'll get to that later. But the main thing, the two areas where money really helped us, but you could do it on a budget and just be less comfortable is one, we stayed in hotels every night. We did not camp. You know, I know there's a lot of people. We ran into people along the trail who were just sleeping rough in a little tent. And the other thing is we had very good equipment. Like I got my SPDs. I trained on them during the summer. It made a huge difference in the amount of energy it took to go a certain distance. You know, I really basically recommend if you're into biking above 40 miles, you know, or even if you're biking every day on a commute, it might be worth it to look at like clipless shoes that like the cleats that just attached to your pedal. And then it was I've been bugging you to install them for years and you didn't get out of it. To be honest, it was one of those things that, you know, after I got them, I just immediately loved them. And it was kind of like, I can't believe I put this off for so long. I'm so stupid, you know, but I, everybody was told me, oh, well, it's hard to get used to and you fall over all the time or you, you have to practice on grass because you'll fall over. And I think the biggest thing with me. There were a few close calls with me, like the time when my, I almost lost a screw from my cleat. But, you know, it basically, I was way more scared of falling over than I probably should have been. And I found it a huge asset to my biking. I wouldn't want to do this trip without a cleat. But basically in terms of, you know, almost over preparing. So what we started doing is we knew this trail, if nothing else, whatever the route would be, we would basically go to Poughkeepsie on the way. So the bike trip that we'd been doing over and over and over again, just because we enjoyed it, that was about what the trip would be. So training wise, we wanted to make sure that we'd be able to do that kind of biking consistently. So we started doing the ride to Poughkeepsie and trying to do it faster without wrecking ourselves. And I remember the time before the last century we rode before we rested and got ready for this trip, we actually like really tried to push ourselves and tried to get to Poughkeepsie like as fast as we could with as few breaks as we could. And I think we both set like, we set so many personal bests on Strava. And the worst and the funniest part was, I think we were both less direct at the end of that century where we pushed like crazy. Then we were on a lot of the previous ones because we'd been doing it so much. You had been training with your panniers. You, instead of doing a backpack, you had been, you know, putting one of your little luggage containers on your bike when we do these Poughkeepsie. I'd carry all the snacks and food because we figured, I'm the, you know, I'm the one who runs half marathons. I'd be the one who would carry the bulk of the weights. Okay, okay. Strong guy. You can, you can, you know, you, he's got those big, you know, big chunky athlete thighs. I was like, let's go. You know, I'm not to, not to humble, not to brag at all, but I am shockingly fast on my bike. Yeah. Well, the doctor at your physical is like, Hey, are you an athlete? And so that always feels kind of good. But anyway, so you had been training with the panniers. I think I was slower on the Poughkeepsie leg when we actually got going because I had luggage because I was carrying weight. We purposely on their actual trip went a lot slower and really paced ourselves on that first day compared to what we were doing normally because we normally got into a cadence where we plan on biking exactly 102 miles and then we'd eat a dinner and like get on a train home as opposed to wake up at dawn the next day and just go. We wouldn't take a lot of breaks. We'd usually like break for lunch, maybe stop to get like ice cream and a bagel or something at the midway point. Yeah, like 50 miles stop and then like two to three stops total on this 100 mile ride. So a century, honestly, like got pretty easy for us. But it's a nice, it's a nice ride too. But in retrospect, it's really pleasant. It's very clear that that was not necessary. Most people who do cycle touring do not take the do not start with the century. Addressive pace that we took. Yeah. I mean, we weren't insane about it in that we didn't do multiple centuries in a row, which I think your initial planning had us going like 180 80 or something like that. And it was much better when we stretched it into 60 mile days instead of 80 mile. Well, yeah, that was partly only because of the storm, though. Yeah. So since we knew we could bike 100 miles and we felt like we were pretty much ready for it, I just spent a couple days in Google Maps looking at the route. I got all the GPS coordinates together and just figuring out about how far we could go per day. I shot for, you know, we knew it was 485 miles. So I shot for 68 miles a day meant we could do it in seven days if there was no trouble, assuming that we do the century the first day, it would be the hardest day and therefore arguably literally every day after that would have been easier. So front loaded average had to be around 70 miles a day, but it could fluctuate quite a bit because if the first day was 100, rest of the days could be less than 70 and it would be fine. But then actually planning the route was a little bit tricky in that there are a lot of nothings between some of these waypoints. Like you get out of some towns along the way and there's a 70 mile stretch of the bike trail where there really aren't hotels. There aren't really restaurants anywhere near the trail. There is nowhere to stop and there's nowhere to eat. So I had to go to all the bars all day. So I had to sort of just really spend a few days looking at waypoints and I'll share the map. Anyone who listens to this, you can look at the map. But basically we had a I originally planned a six day trip that I planned a seven day trip and then an eight day trip and that way we had three different versions of the trip overlaid on a map with different points that were guaranteed food that were guaranteed hotel, all the different options we can have. So if something went wrong, we had like an increasing number of fallback plans and fallback destinations along the way and that took a few days of effort. That was actually the most annoying part. I'd say that was the hardest part of the entire trip compared to the biking. And I really appreciate that you did that because you're, I guess your organizational skills are very good and you're pretty good about planning travel. So you're kind of like, okay, what timing wise? Like we need to reach our destination by sundown. It's about here. You did a really, really tight. But like, I got to say, between Schenectady and Utica, like there really aren't places to stop. It's a little bit sparse. Because of COVID, we were still trying to avoid indoor dining as much as possible, which meant we had to find places we could eat outdoors or get take away. And luckily the weather was mostly good on our trip. Yeah. So do you want to talk a little bit about what we packed? Just quick go through our training all set. You know, we did all our training. We're ready to go. And honestly, the one most important thing I would have to say is if you ever do a trip like this, if nothing else, you have to spend money on good, comfortable biking jerseys, really good, really comfortable shammies. Butt pads. And honestly, get the Ortlieb pannier. Just Google for it. You'll, it's like, there's only one. Everyone who does cycle touring uses Ortlieb. They seem to be literally the best. There's no question. Almost everyone, in fact, I think a hundred percent of the people we saw who were similarly touring had Ortlieb branded panniers, like across the. The guy from Germany. So I definitely think our philosophy, just like you in office chairs, it's basically like we do tend to go for like a moderately priced luggage, but we tend to go for well designed stuff. You know, screw bells and whistles or fancy design or anything. I want a piece of luggage or a piece of athletic equipment that I can depend on and that I know is, you know, has that design. And so you will be spending a bit of money up front on your luggage, but it's going to be worth it. Well, they last forever, though. Like an Ortlieb pannier will last you the rest of your life. I remember we were biking in Prospect Park not too long before we did the strip and we ended up talking to some guy we were riding with and he was like, oh, I've had these things 15 years. Yeah. And they're totally waterproof and yada, yada. So it's very funny. I'll get to that in a second. But like, I feel that people who notice your panniers and they're like, ah, it's kind of like an anime nerd seeing an anime t-shirt being like, ah, this is somebody who enjoys my same interests. Oh, yeah. On the rest of the trip that was and it started with day one, but the funniest thing was normally when we bike, like other cyclists or stop somewhere, like you might wave or like do a pleasant hello, but you don't really talk much. But if you have fully loaded looking panniers on your bike, if you're obviously touring, everyone who bike tours like pulls up next to you. If you're going the same direction and like asks about your destination, like, oh, hey, yeah, where are you headed? How far are you into the trip? And it was a pattern that persisted. So if you want to meet people, even if you're not bike touring, just put your panniers on your bike and put a pillow in each one so they look like they're full. And I guarantee almost every cycling tourist person you pass will literally talk to you like unexpectedly and want to know about your trip. I mean, I saw a guy who was doing bike touring on the West Coast when we were in Seattle for packs and the police officers, they weren't like messing with them for anything. They were just like really curious, like, you mean you biked all the way from California kind of thing. So it's like people will notice your baggage and be like what you do and kind of thing. Now, in terms of bikes, we used to our regular old hybrids like carbon fork in the front, regular old like bike, aluminum body kind of sturdy, not super racy, you know, very medium upright posture. And I got to say a lot of cycling people were trying to tell us that we should get drop bars and have like a road bike. But I would say the far majority of touring people we passed, they were in hybrids like ours or even less aggressive bikes. They were not riding road bikes. I think we saw one touring person in the entire trip who had an actual road bike as opposed to a hybrid. I mean, I think I am super glad we didn't try to get a road bike posture would be so uncomfortable no matter how much arrow it saved you. So I mean, like the what you'd make up for in speed, there were so many like gravel parts of the trail, so many like bits of slightly rough terrain that weren't quite mountain bike worthy, but we're just it felt a lot like us biking in New York where you got to be careful of potholes or rugged pavement or that kind of thing. And so never mind just the comfort of sitting more upright. Yeah, like a high speed cycling posture is not the touring posture. So I would actually say if you want to try this and you're mostly a road biker, I would recommend renting or buying a hybrid or something easier for a trip like this. The only change I would make to my bike and I might just do this anyway is I think I want to add some horns. Some of those, you know, you see bikes that have like two extra handlebars that are kind of facing forward like the little goat horns on the edges of their handlebars. I think I would get some of those installed, not like full on ones with controls or anything, just something to rest on because you don't really need to shift or touch your brakes much on a trip like this. You're pretty much just cruising for hours at a time, comfortably at a steady pace. Yep. That's that's why having having the SPD is it just felt like I almost imagined myself like part of the machine. It's like I'm lacking in the pistons and ready to get going. And then those those machine would just keep cranking. Yep. So in terms of packing, we packed honestly in a couple areas a little too light. But frankly, in a couple other areas, we packed way too much. Like we brought seven tubes and we didn't have a single fly. We actually had zero mechanical problems the entire trip. Nothing went wrong. It was probably good. We had like that's the part I don't want to overpair because there would have been parts we'd be stranded also because there are like 100 mile segments where there are no bike shops or even like easily accessible roads. Like it would not have been easy to get somewhere like to a bike shop. So if we'd had a problem, we would have a big problem. But literally, we could have gone away with bringing like three tubes. We would have been fine. So we each had about one point five regular casual clothes, outfits and three kits of the you know, padded shorts and cycling jerseys. And so we were we had planned on at some point doing laundry along the way. We did laundry twice along the way. So basically we had three changes of clothes, which actually is pretty generous compared to like some bike people talk about. I mean, a lot of people we met brought a lot more with them. We didn't bring any cold weather gear really, which was a problem on the last day. Yeah. And you know, so be prepared first aid kit. Another thing that was absolutely vital was the shammy butter. Yeah, just cover your butt in lube every single day, put on way more than you think you need. It's it's bike lube, but not for your bike. It's for your butt. And so you put it all over your ass and then you don't get as much chafing. That's the main thing. It's like you've got to that was the biggest problem. It wasn't muscle soreness. It's just how do I sit on this, you know, funny little seat going really fast for a whole day without accidentally destroying my butt bones. Now, even then, like we did all that biking, we had that point was important because you'll get a lot of extra problems beyond just chafing. If you don't accustomed your butt to being in the saddle. Yeah. But again, as we discovered on the trip, most people doing a trip like this did about half the hours in the saddle per day that we did. We're just nuts, apparently. So basic toiletries. Yada, yada, I could bring a toothbrush and we also brought a little bit of medicine like I had medicine and then we brought ibuprofen. So after a hard day's work, keep your inflammation down. Yeah, we had a vitamin I every day after the trip. And that really that saved me. That was that was a night and day thing. And if you're in a place that won't totally get all weirdly, we brought edibles to because we got open and an edible every year after that kind of riding. You pretty much just go straight to sleep. We were after we ate dinner, we would just go straight to sleep every night. Yeah. So we'd basically come in, be completely wrecked, shower, get nice and clean, change into our casual clothes outfit and then just like blop and just be lying down just like chilling, looking at our phones, having a good conversation. I literally only brought one shirt, one pair of pants and one pair of boxers to use as pajamas. And that's the only non-biking clothes I even had. Yeah. And then water bottles. We use camel backs. So we carry most of our water supply on our backs over the course of the day. Yep. In the start of the trip, I carried a lot more because stopping. I wasn't sure exactly how easily we'd be able to refill and stop along the way because some of the trail segments are pretty remote. But as the trip went on, I just carried less and less water every day. Yeah. We kind of figured, you know, figure out how much we go through per day, figure out the temperature. We probably used less water because it was a little bit chillier. And then, you know, also a little bit snack. You want to those muesli bars, those little cookies and stuff that you can kind of boost your blood sugar if you're stopping in the middle of the day. Well, also, I pretty much was eating constantly on the whole trip because we couldn't really, we're going to stop and eat that often on a trip like this. And like some of these segments, there really were no good places to stop and eat that really lined up with our aggressive schedule. So I was pretty much just constantly eating in the saddle the whole time. I was just eating sugar gels and granola bars and peanuts. And the advice I've always heard from cyclists and this is just regular cyclists too, not even touring is if you're doing hard, long distances, just eat constantly and eat way more than you think you need to and it'll work out fine. So a big thing that I found worked really well for me is big carb breakfast and big carb and protein dinner and then little sugar stuff in between. So it's like I'm munching on a little potato chip. I'm munching on a little sugar. I think I ate about a pound of peanuts on the first half of the trip. So you're so you're eating nuts, you're eating these snacks along the way, but I'm not really eating heavily well. I'm actually in the middle of the ride. So yeah. And my only regrets in terms of packing is well, like I said, we didn't need nearly as many tubes. And I had the bare minimum repair equipment. I think we were good on that front. I actually didn't bring the GoPro when I don't regret that because it would have just been a distraction. I would have to fuss with the whole time. Yeah. But I really should have brought more chamois because you can just re-wear a dirty bike jersey. Yeah, jerseys are fine. They just smell a little sweaty. It is kind of dangerous to re-wear a chamois unless you wash it. Yeah, it's just you don't want that. Well, not only are they gross, but your skin's going to be a little chafed and irritated on a bike trip like this. You get an infection. Yeah. You know, it's bad. You know, we were lucky in that neither of us, because some people get blisters on their sits bones, but that's usually caused by cheap chamois, bad bike seats or bad cycling posture or people who try to do this without a customing their bodies to it. So it doesn't being being fit like super fit does not necessarily matter on a trip like this as much as being accustomed to riding a bike case in point. One of the couples we met along the way, they were like double our age and they were doing the exact same trip in the opposite direction. They were just going 40 miles a day instead of 80 miles a day. OK, let's go through the trip because I want to talk about them. I want to talk about some of the characters we met along the way. We'll go day by day, but the last bits are on prep. I wish we'd brought more chamois because depending on the timing and the weather and all the things that happen on the road, it is difficult to have enough time to wash chamois and have them be dry enough to use the next day. You don't want to put those in a dryer. It'll often ruin them. Yeah. And most hotels, unless you stay at like a best Western, don't even have washing facilities. So like you'll get to a point where all our chamois were going to be dirty. So we hit a deadline now of this day. We have to wash them at some point or we are screwed and we couldn't even do the trick I wanted to do of let's wash a few and like hang them off the back of the bike so they'll dry like on the way to the next destination. It rained on us. Because it was pouring rain. So if I had to change our packing on this trip, I would bring one or two fewer cycling jerseys because I just wear the same one over and over again. I'd bring one super heavy duty warm one no matter how hot it is outside just in case and I would double the number of chamois I brought at the expense of most of my other equipment. Yeah. Bring extra underwear. I would almost say bring enough chamois to make the whole trip without having to do laundry. And when I say underwear, I mean literally bike shorts. They're not underwear because you wear them on the outside. Yeah, I just changed into the same like pair of tech pants every restaurant along the way. Yeah. So we started off bright and early. I felt like that little bit of pre-ride trepidation, but I was mostly just excited. I was taking off in the middle of a very heavy work schedule, but I was kind of like I'm doing it and they can, you know, they can deal with it. I'm gonna do this. This is important. I had wrapped up all my stuff at work and we kind of just had an evening to sit down and look at all our stuff and like, fillet everything out and be ready to go. And we had some burgers and beer. We had the bar next door, you know, and we just prepared and I was like, OK. And one thing we hadn't done, which was it ended up being totally fine. But when we first set out, it was basically exactly the same as all of our centuries, which almost made it easier like just walk out the door at like 6 a.m. and just start riding like we do every weekend, except instead of having a lightly packed pannier or in your case, no panniers, we had four fully packed panniers and neither one of us had ever, ever biked with full panniers before. And you know what, it's totally fine. It's actually no difficulty at all. Yeah, it was it was great. And the weather was good. And so we hit a regular trail or up in the Bronx and this dude comes up next to us. And he's also got like obviously he's a cyclist. He's got the full kit. He's like, you know, coming along with some cool. He's got a little bag. He doesn't have a big bag, but you know, he he's obviously prepared and does a lot of this kind of thing. And he was like, oh, are you guys touring? And we're like, heck yeah, you know, we're going to Buffalo. And, you know, which that was the route we were taking. He was the one who was even like, oh, yeah, I talked to you because you're panniers. Yeah, we talked. He was like, everyone who's got panniers is going to talk to you. It's like a secret code. And it was funny because he was like super overly friendly to the point where I was like, wow, this guy is kind of like that friendly nerd at a convention who's just like want to talk to you. But he was really nice. And it was just like, you know, we rode for like 20 miles together. We were swapping stories of like other bike trips we've both done. And the most interesting part is dude was definitely like a cyclist with a capital C compared to us. Like he could book. Yeah. But while we were right next to each other, it was a weird feeling when we were thinking like, oh, this guy is a super pro. Like I wonder what he thinks of us. And then when he starts asking about our route, his first reaction was that is a lot of miles per day. What the fuck is wrong with you? Yeah. But, you know, it was it was kind of cool because I felt like the miles to our way point where we usually stop and and take a little break. They just kind of melted away and he continued on. I think he was going with Territown or wherever just having just like us having a regular Sunday ride. You know, yeah. And then like shortly after that, you know, we keep biking and we're on one of those bridges, like in the middle of nowhere. That's about the furthest that we normally ride if we're doing a round trip back to the city. And when we get up to that point, we pass our second person who's in Paniers. We took pictures of each other. She asked us to take her picture and we noticed the Paniers. They said, where are you headed? You know, and she's up to Montreal and we were like, oh, we're taking the same route, but we're going to Buffalo. And we we kind of talked a little bit about like, you know, waypoints. And we mentioned Hudson and she told us, oh, I've been up there and there's this really cute cafe. And so that's the other thing is as people you meet, they are very helpful in that they want to tell you stuff. They've accumulated knowledge and they want to share it. Yep. Stop in this town. Don't stop in this town. Here's the good. And if you've talked to these cycling tourists, every single town along the way, they know the place that is like friendly. There's like the cyclist restaurant and like our friend, you know, Scott of Geek Nights. He definitely has the cycling buddies and they all have these like, oh, yeah, that ice cream place, that grocery store, that restaurant. And so everybody knows these waypoints and loves to help a help a fellow cyclist out. So I think we left on a Friday, so I was technically blowing off work and my phone kept ringing and I was like, oh, no, it's probably my boss who needs something because everything's always an emergency and on fire. Turned out it was my mom. And while we were we were stopped, she was like, oh, yeah, we were thinking of having the memorial on Friday, the next Friday. So we're like, oh, we have exactly a week to make it. And that actually gives us a buffer day. So we were planning, you know, we're going to go home, sleep the night at my parents' house and then, you know, do the the family get together. So. So day one, all told, like in terms of the riding. We rode a hundred and two miles over the course of about nine hours in the saddle. Yeah. And we gained half a mile of elevation. That's what we do all the time. And we went through the great swamp, which is just slowly week a week a week uphill. But it just felt great, partly because we'd been training so hard and we really forced ourselves, even though we didn't need it to take breaks and to go at a slower pace than we normally would on this day one, because this, you know, we'd never gone beyond this point before. We had never biked this far and not had a beer and taken a train home and slept in the next day. So one thing I want to mention about Poughkeepsie coming into Poughkeepsie. I like Poughkeepsie. It was fun, but I don't ever want to do this trip again, biking all the way to Poughkeepsie because Poughkeepsie is not actually a great place to stay the night on a cycling trip. So one, there aren't a lot of hotels in Poughkeepsie and we ended up paying the hotel we stayed in. The Poughkeepsie Grand is a fancy hotel there. It is. It was more expensive by double than any other hotel or motel we stayed at. It was the one by the convention along the trip. Yeah. And I got to tell you, Poughkeepsie, we were interrupted overnight by not one, but two illegal street drag races. It was the fast and the furious out there. I swear to God, should we really sure? The second one was broken up by the cops. There was all sorts of like yelling and shenanigans and police nonsense outside our hotel all night long, which I used to live in Poughkeepsie and that's kind of how it was. But two, I was worried. Because the other thing I was worried about on a trip like this is a lot of hotels and a lot of businesses in general get weird about bikes. Like they won't let you bring the bike inside or they freak out at you if the bike is in the wrong place. And we were prepared for that. I was low key worried about that the whole way, especially because we were staying in the super fancy hotel in Poughkeepsie. So we come up to the Concierge desk and the front desk and, you know, we're a little bit timid. I'm like, can we take our bikes up in the layers? Oh, gosh, yes. Definitely take your bikes into the room. You know, don't leave them down here. They will definitely be stolen. They will definitely be stolen. And everybody was really nice and we stopped at our usual pub. There's a there's a micro brewery called Zeus. And I recommend it if you're in Poughkeepsie because it was kind of a bar and grill food, but just really, really good mozzarella sticks and hearty fare. And we were so hungry. It really hit the spot. And the other weird story about Poughkeepsie is while we're biking in, we just see these rabbits out in the middle of like a side yard and they're just like mooching around between two like small, like French style apartment buildings. Yeah. There's just these rabbits rabbits that from a kind of like those kind of look like domestic rabbits. I'm super by we both like weren't sure how to react at first. Like they were just they were chilling and they seemed happy and just doing their thing. But we're just both like we stop and we're like, huh, like, OK, so I've been sort of involved with rabbit rescue off and on for like years and years. And people dump rabbits a ton, you know, just like people do with with other animals are just like, go be free in the middle of the city. Like just let them go in a park. And I was like, oh, gosh, I hope somebody didn't decide to dump a rabbit because then I don't really have time to deal with this. I'm not near home. Yeah, we're the end of our day. We're literally this is in the last mile of our hundred and two mile day one ride. We're just, you know, we're looking at these rabbits like, OK, do we like ask somebody or call somebody? I go over to check it out. I'm like, all right, let's see. I'm going to test if these are truly domestic rabbits are like what they're doing. They were domestic rabbits, but they were obviously not feral. They weren't scared of people at all. Yeah, I walk over. I kind of poke at them and let me pet her. The other one was chill. These little rabbits. And then this lady comes up and, you know, she obviously lives in a nearby apartment. He said, you know, anybody are these rabbits belonging to somebody? He said, oh, yeah, those are so and so is he just kind of let some grays in the yard. And, you know, the one got hit by a car, which was really sad. But, you know, he just kind of let some run around. I was like, OK, but, you know, they belong to somebody. He's like, oh, yeah. And so I was like, OK, you know, I guess I'll let that be. And the little kid obviously had interacted with the rabbit. Well, the kid was like, was yelling, I want to stay in pet hoppy. Hopla, hopla. I want to hopla. Yeah, the mom was definitely like does not super approve of this whole situation. It's a little bit kind of like, you know, but then I thought about it. I'm like, you know, I'd rather have rabbits who are like in a little bit of danger, but they're just generally kept free range. I don't like people who let their cats wander around, you know, it's like cats can get it by predators. They can get hit by cars, you know, as long as there's somebody at the end of the day who cares for these animals that, you know, that's that's well, I was confident they were really good. Having an OK life partly because they're long hair rabbits. Yeah, they had fuzzy. Well, they had zero mats. They definitely they these rabbits get brushed every night. So someone's looking out for me. Anyway, brief rabbit interlude. I just did not expect to see two domestic rabbits grazing in someone's lawn just like by the road in the middle of the by by themselves all on their own. They were they were good little guys. So that was first night and we we went to bed and in our expensive hotel and which honestly, for being the fanciest and most expensive hotel in Poughkepsey, it's actually pretty run down and dingy. Yeah, it's like I said, it's the convention center. Well, that place was not worth five hundred dollars a night. No, it wasn't. But that hotel seems to exist solely for people's weddings. So as a result, it had a breakfast breakfast and the breakfast buffet was like a gigantic hearty really good one because it's a breakfast buffet for all the weddings that happened the night before. Yeah, we got up early. There wasn't anyone really down there yet. So we just loaded up three plates full of food and got on our way. Kind of kind of rubbing shoulders with all the hung over party guests and stuff. So yeah, we got up bright and early and I was surprisingly not sore. And that was pretty much the theme. This was the waking up the next morning where we only had a 60 mile ride the next day planned. But that was the moment of truth because we'd never biked further than that before. We were going to bike about five hundred yards and then we would be at the furthest point we'd ever been. If I take one more step, it's the furthest outside the Shire I've ever been. So day two, 60 miles we had to do in about six hours that ended up taking us in another half mile of elevation gain. And this was the trip to a town called Hudson. So the route was basically now from Poughkeepsie and uncharted territory. We go over this gigantic pedestrian bridge. Beautiful walkway. Around the west side of the river for a well north. Then we'll go back over the Hudson on another bridge and then go the rest of the way north to this little town called Hudson. So we we cross the bridge from Poughkeepsie and that's the first time in all the time we've been coming up to Poughkeepsie that we actually went all the way across the bridge. Yeah, the first time we made it to that bridge, we didn't even go all the way across it because I had chafed my butt so badly because that was the first. Well your knee hurt too. My knee was busted and I'd chafed my butt pretty badly. So we didn't even go over the bridge. We just booked to the zoos to get some food and then got GTFO'd. Yeah. And then so we started going into more woodsy territory and then we passed this part where there are all these like deep echoey caves down along the side of the trailway. And like you'd you'd shout and your voice would echo into this darkness. It was really cool looking. And we found out it was a huge mining area specifically cement, a very specific kind of cement that's mostly only found in this area and it's still usable to this day and it's a really important natural resource. And so this is where our sturdy bikes came into play and you know we're going over stone dust and in some cases gravel and doing a little bit more of trail riding than street riding. I mean the entire route literally the entire route with the exception of maybe five hundred to 750 yards in one town where you have to get on the road once was entirely paved asphalt. And from this point on the trail is a mix of stone dust which is basically ground up rocks compacted pretty tightly and it's it's very similar to asphalt in terms of biking. It's bikeable. It's it's not the best but it's it's really but some some of the segments are not actually stone dust despite calling themselves stone dust. It's just gravel road. Some of it was just dirt road straight up and some of it was actual single track and some of it was single track mountain biking. So the coolest part of this segment is so we're biking through this part with all these little caves and such and we pass this little shack with like a little kitchen attached to it. It looked like a little like witch house in the woods and there's tables and chairs set up. This tiny little coffee shop is set up along the trail and run by I'm assuming based on like the general aesthetic and all like the books they had around. They're kind of like the yoga ladies who are into like meditation and stuff. And they made a really good like rose was it lavender lemonade or something. This is the point where we didn't be like we had already eaten. We didn't need to stop for anything. And this is the first moment where we deviated from how we normally ride because the whole point of this trip is to sort of put us around the mooch and the state. So we decided to if we ever see anything interesting we will just divert toward it. We'll just stop. We'll poke at it. We don't have to get every day is easier than the first day and we realized that we felt great so far. So we just stopped and we hung out for a while and we met this Scottish couple who were literally doing the exact same trip as us in reverse. They started in Buffalo and they were on their like third to last day coming in the opposite direction of us. So this couple was like you know one of those things where I'm like I want to be like that because it's like they were older than us but they had been doing touring for a long time and it's definitely more of a thing in Europe. And they gave us like tips about if you ever want to bike to Italy through the Dolomites and you know and they did something kind of interesting since they were from overseas. They bought cheaper like you know hybrids and then they wrote them all across the state and then they were going to donate them to charity. They figured for the cost of shipping a bike you know might as well pass the bike along to a kid in New York. And so I'm like that's awesome. And so yeah they were just puttering long on their on their hybrids and you know they they recognized us as fellow travelers and said hey you know what's going on. Though they too were like yeah that's a 14 day trip. You're insane. And then after that you know we get through the forest and there's we saw some cool stuff along the way. There was like this little wedding resort venue and then we already passed a lot of the in this area as you get further up like once you get past Albany this really isn't there anymore like this is not a thing but in the entire bike trail all the way up to Albany there are an increasing number of breweries and farms. Local businesses that know the bike trails there and know that bougie like cycling people from the cities often pass through this area and they have set up all sorts of stuff. Little tourism like you know people from the city they even that far north. I wish I hadn't passed that whiskey distillery at like 1015 in the morning. I I'm sorry when I've got a 70 mile day ahead of me. I'm kind of like I'm not sure I'm ready for whiskey tasting. Yep. I did stick to drink any alcohol during the day on any of these trips and that was that was wise. That was wise. But like there was signs being like come to our farm meet our goats. I was like oh you know if I didn't have places to be I would for sure go to your farm and meet your one was it's an it's a nice paved asphalt trail the entire way. Like that's a particular kind of cycling. Day two was the most varied because we started off on that same kind of trail. Then we went through the like gravelly woods and all these other things. And then we go through all these little towns where each town has implemented the trailway a different way. So there's just these little bike paths of varying quality and dimensions just it'll go through a town and kind of whine through alleys and stuff and then leave the town and be back on the on a road for a while. And we saw all these little towns. I couldn't remember the name of any of them along the way. And it was just really easy chill riding. And we passed a variety of places like it was it was really interesting to see all these different types of I don't know lack of a better word places along the way. There was a lot of road riding, but it was very sedate road riding very picturesque, you know, small hills, little like rolling waves of hills. And you know, it wasn't bothered at all. Traffic was fine, except the horrible bridge. Yeah. One ninety one ninety nine, the Kingston Rhinecliffe Bridge, because the route we take, it goes over the Hudson. And then it comes back over the Hudson. And then it'll go over the Hudson again when you get up near Albany. Yeah. So you basically crossed the Hudson multiple times. So this is a bridge across the Hudson. The Scottish couple warned us and said, oh, that bridge was awful. And I was like, how bad could it be? I go across bridges all the time. So this one, it doesn't have a separated bike path. The separated bike path is absolutely garbage and under construction and would be horrible. And it has extreme. It's only a two lane bridge with extreme car traffic going over. It's very busy. You are right up next to you're just praying that somebody is paying attention. It isn't going to swerve into the bike path because there is nothing between you and them. It's also extremely high, extremely exposed and shockingly windy. So my advice and how I got over that bridge without having a freaking panic attack was basically, I just kept my vision on the line. Just keep swimming. The perspective point where my lane converges into a point in the distance and just be like, keep those white lines in your vision. You just stay within those white lines and you'll probably be fine. I got to say, though, on the downhill because I was a mountain biker for a long time. So I got my bike up to about 50 miles an hour on the downhill. Yeah, I took it at a reasonable pace. I break on downhills. He doesn't because he's the nut. Yeah. But but that was fun. And basically, after we crossed that, then on the other side of the river, we had to go through a college. I think it was Bard College. Yeah. And that was really nice. And we talked a lot about how we wish communities were more like colleges and universities and like the idea of campus and everything being walkable and stuff. We're feeling very kindly disposed toward, you know, walking and biking and public transportation and very like unhappy at cars for obvious reasons. Yeah. But luckily, the like the the trail is interesting because at a few points, like it follows the road for a little while, like when it's convenient, but then it just diverges off and cuts through this college campus and goes around back and through the woods and then links up to a different road further on. We ran into a guy who told us he had a butt and back fist and that we should stay there next time. Another another instance where he was funny he's like, he'll never forget the name. And you know what? I will never forget the name the Seminsky in ski. It looks nice. I went to the website, but we didn't stay there because we had already made reservations. Yeah. But he was also disappointed because he was cool. Like he was riding his bike and he had, you know, a bunch of gear on it. Yeah. He this is a person who cycles the way we were cycling to get around, like to get between destinations in his day to day life. Yeah. Which if you live anywhere along this trail, actually would work out pretty well. This is really easy to bike on. But he was like, oh, yeah, you stay at my plate. Like the plate gets it's right there. And I think he was disappointed that we were going 60 miles that day and we were not anywhere. We were not going to stop. Yeah. We were about halfway. And yeah. And then we got near Hudson. You know, it was a more of the same until we got right near Hudson. And then more road riding, riding in the shoulder. Well, that was also where most of our elevation gain was. It was at the end. It's all big uphill to come into Hudson. We see this traffic light at the top of what feels like a mountain. Yeah. You know, we're just like, I see this intersection up ahead. I'm like, that's got to be the town. We're you're out of steam. And I was just like, oh, and just pedaling up this hill. I'm like, I feel like my knee's going to quit on me. I feel like I'm going to fall over. Maybe a car is going to hit me. I don't know. But I made it up the hill. I was fine. So I was I was pretty running on fumes by the time I got into Hudson. But once we were there, it's such a darling little town and it just feels like the kind of place that feels very posh. And it's one of those towns where people from the city drive up or take them train up every for a weekend and stay at a bed and breakfast. Historic architecture founded by Quakers, but with a lot of little coffee shops and small plates. What have you? I was happy to see a lot of like pro LGBT stuff. Like places would have a rainbow flag in their window. And I was like, yeah, upstate, you know, it's still got still got cool people. So we settled in. We had a fantastic dinner at this really fancy French restaurant in this little outdoor terrace area. We saw in the picture. I know what I draw. I had an April spritz. We we showered first. That was the key thing. We check into our little bed and breakfast kind of guess it wasn't a bed and breakfast, little hotel. It wasn't bed and breakfast. We just didn't avail ourselves of the food. Yeah. It's one of those places that has an attached restaurant. Yeah. And we could have eaten there, but we ate at the other fancy looking place in their little like backyard terrace garden instead. So so we ate outside. We ate in the garden of this French restaurant. It was excellent food. I think probably it was the best food, like the best prepared. That was definitely the best meal we had on the entire trip, you know, it was like we got mushrooms on toast and I got really good fish. And, you know, so that was very tasty. And the room was amazing. Well, it was one of those like bougie little like rent this on Airbnb. They give you a code that you go like you key in to get into your little room. There isn't really room service. And it was nice. And like we did every night. We took everything out of our bags, cleaned everything kind of like put it back together. So it's like we unpacked and then repacked. So it was it felt very nice to kind of get everything together and to shower and get all clean. And I felt great. Yeah, now it's funny because this is the point like sort of the next coming into this day three is where I had the most trepidation of the entire trip because this was when it was real. This was like it's not just oh, we did two days in a row like we can do this. It's now we are three full days into a seven day trip. Are we still going to be able to bike because we have to bike 10 more miles on day three than we did on the previous day. We had to make it 69 miles to Schenectady. So we were going to go the rest of the way north, hit Albany and then make a left turn and come around under the actual Erie Canal. So this this day three was when it really felt real. And I got to say by the end of day three, we still felt great. Like it was it was actually well day three presented its challenges. But that was also a quite varied day. So we started off and the weather was great. And in in Hudson again, there was this little coffee shop that had it was like coffee shop and motorcycle equipment. And I sent a picture to my sister, like check this out, you know. So and we got cornered by a rich woman and her dog who wanted to talk to the night. She was definitely like she wanted to talk about politics, but she was like liberal, you know, like the liberal white lady. She was like, well, I come from Quakers and this is my dog. And it was a very cute dog. And so we, you know, chatted over coffee with this rando. And that was that was pleasant. And there's like a certain species of rich person who live in these kinds of upstate New York towns. And I think most of their socializing is with whatever other people like pass through the town and visit the town. It definitely felt like that. It was perfectly fine breakfast. It's kind of one of those people like you run into the same species that like, you know, ski resorts and stuff like that, taking, taking the boat out for a spin. But anyway, but the morning on the way out, this is where I checked the weather because we had planned for a little bit of buffer day and everything and the weather looked okay. But I see the first inklings that there is a major storm system developing west of us. So we're on, we go along this this country trail, you know, through some kind of rule. So right along the high tension power lines. And I guess that's where they decided to put the trail until we hit Erie. This is where the trail like after we do go through a few back alleys and a few like literally the parking lots behind effectively strip malls for a little bit. And eventually we get on the stone dust that they kept telling us about on the trailway. And from this point on, I would say 60, 70% of the riding was on just stone dust in the wilderness, either next to train tracks, next to a river, next to a creek or under some power lines. Yep. And so, you know, you put you put bike paths next to infrastructure. It makes sense just how infrastructure pops up next to natural formations. You know, there's already a pathway cut in the mountain. You know, might as well have multiple kind of things going through it. Yep. So I ignore the weather thing because it didn't look like it would hit us or if it did, it would be near the end of the day. So that was a that was a later in the day problem. And we just keep plugging until we actually get up to kind of snuck up on us. Like before we knew it, we're in Albany because the way we see the skyline you come over that ridge. The original plan, if we did in six days, was to stop in Albany. But instead, Albany was just like something we passed through. We didn't even stop. We just went up and through Albany and all the way to disconnect it. Yeah. So, you know, we come and we see the egg and which is like, I think it's the theater or something, but I'm like, look, it's Albany on the horizon. And I got to say it was a weird feeling to get to Albany and to one, know that we got there entirely by biking on a contiguous bike path that goes all the way to our apartment in New York and to that we'd done it entirely on our own up to this point and we're not even stopping. Like we're not. This isn't even our destination. We're just passing through. So we did. We did take a little break in Albany and like a park by by the highway. Well, there's a rest stop. Yeah. That is also like a learning center and part of the infrastructure that is like along the bike path because the bike path goes in a few other directions like this is a nexus of a bunch of different bike routes in New York State. We were just on one of them. So in the middle of this bike path, along the road, there's a car rest stop that we just stopped at. Where are the only ones there? Yep. And so it was it was nice. And so we got through. I learned about sturgeon from like tourists plaques be like learn about the Mohawk River and the Hudson and, you know, about our waterways in New York State. That's something that we learned a lot about is waterways, you know, wasn't anywhere easy to stop to get food, though. So we kind of just decided going through because the interesting enough, the bike path through Albany compared to some of the other cities we bike through was very segregated from the city like it was either right on the river or like in its own dedicated area they had clearly built and fenced off from everything. Yeah. And this was an interesting one because this was around where we started to turn to go west. Well, you hit a very specific point where you have this great photo where you hit the point where the bike path diverges because most of the people we passed up to this point other than the Scottish couple, they weren't going the way we were going. They were coming to and from Montreal. Yeah. So the cool part when the bike trail splits off, it has signs just like the New York State through a does and it's like turn here to go west, turn here to go north. They look like freeway signs. We stopped and took our cute little picture like this is the fork and you know, we pass some some interesting things along the way like where they make the nuclear reactors. We saw a thing that was like Department of Energy nukes question. We both have the atomic power. Well, both of us independently had our this feels like a secure with a capital S. We're biking along the thing and be like, it was like no trespassing by order of government. And I'm like, yeah, there's there's visible material being contained within. Yeah. And so anyway, how long we were next to that thing because it was such energy. There was like the G factory, too. Yeah. Lots of lots of big stuff like that. But anyway, but where the trail diverges the north part like toward Montreal kind of just followed the road and like went off on its own way. But where we were going basically takes a hard left and into the woods for us time. And this is when it started to rain. You know, it's going up. I remember going up the hill and there had been a fair amount of climbing and I was starting to get a little bit beat. My legs were starting to get sore. We were tired. And we were tired. And, you know, so we're like, OK, where do we go? And then it says detour. And I'm like, oh, come on. I don't want to go on a detour. I'm tired. I mean, we buy. We've liked over 200 miles at this point. Yeah. And yeah, we and it's raining. We're not raining hard yet, but it is raining and so we're starting to get into the woods. And we look at this detour sign and we're like, you know what? Whatever. How bad could it be? I look at the map and like there's no rivers over there. It's not like it's going to be impassable. Let's just fucking do it. And guess what? It is destroyed. It's mud everywhere. And, you know, just big pieces of pavement just sticking up. And this is where I'm very glad I didn't have a road bike because we're just kind of picking our way down this nasty muddy wet wet slope. And this is also where we we encountered a few more cycling tourists along the way or like doing their thing. But a lot of them would talk about how they would skip segments of the trail and like go off onto the road instead of following the trail because the road was more direct. But honestly, if that and it didn't save us time more pleasant and more comfortable. So so despite the fact that our detour was totally justified, I'm kind of glad we didn't take the detour because then we just stayed in the woods. We saw lots of little rabbits. Oh, that's right. It was stupid season because it was getting toward fall, which means that all the chipmunks and squirrels are very busy. Yeah, and they run around everywhere back and forth in front of the bike. And so we basically had a thing where we call it the little guy patrol and like whoever's in front would kind of be like, I see a chipmunk by the side of the trail. And so you'd have to just like when you see deer and you're driving a car, you're just like, I'm watching you to make sure that you don't run in front of me. And so we saw bunnies. We saw deer. We saw a lot of rabbits on this trip. We average multiple rabbits per day. Yeah, and I think only the last day was the day we didn't see even one rabbit. No, we did. It was in my granddad's house. Yes, at the very hanging out in the I got a picture of it. Literally in the driveway of my granddad's house. But the other part of this is right where we turn left and go off into the woods for the segment we're describing just as it starts to rain. There is nowhere to stop. There is no shelter. There are no way points. There isn't even really a way to get back to civilization. There's a bench once in a while. Yeah, so it starts raining harder and harder and harder. And we stop at one point. We're like, should we stop and take a break? And we realize there's literally no point. That's the only way out is through, man. We're not going to get less wet. We're not going to get warmer. Every second we stay outside, we're just getting colder. We are soaked. We can't even use our phones for navigation anymore because our fingers are so wet and cold. So it was ridiculous. Like, I started laughing because it was so much water. We stopped at one point and we sat on a bench with rain pouring down on us, eating snacks wet because it's the best we can do and we need energy to push through the end. By the time we get near our way point for the night, it is raining so hard. Like, I can't even see. I had to take off my glasses. I took off my glasses earlier. And we couldn't find the hotel. Like, I wasn't sure. There was a bunch of hotels in this cluster, like, off the freeway. And I couldn't tell which quadrant the hotel was in, nor could I use my phone because the wet and rain. So we, like, take our bikes under this, like, freeway overpass and we're huddled in the rain. In the mud, yeah. And I am, like, trying to dry my phone up enough and, like, unwrinkle my finger enough to do anything with it to find our hotel. We finally figure it out and we bike to the mud behind the hotel and we get there and thank fucking Satan. This hotel has washers and dryers and we have this gigantic suite because no one stays in a whole, like, tell like this. It was basically like this residence-in type thing. Yeah, a long-term business trip type of hotel. So it's like where they put, like, you know, somebody who works at GE and they've got to stay for, like, a month or something. And so it had a little kitchenette. It had, like, a big bathroom and unsweet kind of thing. And yeah, they had a washer and dryer. The dryer, actually, we got lucky with the chamois because it was basically, like, they had a setting with no heat. Yeah. And it was just air-drying. Because at this point, we were, we had, like, I had one more chamois I think I could wear and, like, we were in a diner. It was already, like, we were down to our last laundries. Yep. So we get in town, we shower. That was, I think, that was the first moment where I had to, we realized, like, oh, there are difficulties we will face. This is going to be badass because up till this point, yeah, of course, like, going into Hudson, I was tired. I'm like, oh, I have to go up this big hill. But this was the first adversity, I guess. I mean, it wasn't bad adversity. Oh, it was super fun. We were just laughing the whole way. Yeah, it was like we were soaked to the bone and cold, but we were like, haha, it's so wet in the forest. And look at that chipmunk. And nothing that can happen to us is dangerous here. It is just uncomfortable in that I am traveling through adversity. And there's no way to get out of the rain. But then we did get out of the rain and washed our clothes. And this was actually... I'd say that was one of the top 10 showers of my life. That was the first time, too. That I had gone and done indoor dining because it was impossible to do outdoor dining. And we just looked at each other. This was the first indoor dining on the trip. This was one of the first indoor dining we'd done since the 2020. Since the quarantine, yeah. So connected to the hotel was if you don't live in New York, you might not know exactly what we're talking about. This is like a New York Italian steakhouse shop shop. The kind of place that has cheap Italian seafood, moderately priced Italian steaks and pasta and stuff on the walls and meh cocktails and all the wine you can drink. And those little lamps that are made of colored glass. And it's basically the kind of place you could get spaghetti as a side dish. Imagine a place that looks kind of like what a TGI Friday's would look like, except it's all kind of done earnestly. It's not a chain that bought a kit to make a TGI Fridays. And the food is like really hearty, more than you can eat like Americana Italian. I freaking cleaned my plate. I ate all the bread. I ate all the salad. I ate all the pasta. If you're listening to this from like the Midwest, you know what it's like? It's kind of like a mountain jack steakhouse. Like the kind of place that your parents would have taken you after the high school band awards night or the kind of place you would go to to celebrate a graduation. Yeah, like I get that. There was a place very similar to that in my town called Elby Grand. It went out of business during the pandemic. It was kind of bummed. But like, again, you know, I got this hearty seafood pasta and this bread. Oh my God, we went in there and just ate like goblins. And we were ravenous. And I'm sure it wasn't the fan. Like I said, the French place was probably finer dining. This was the second best meal of the whole trip. But I was so hungry and it tasted so good. There is no better spice than hunger. You know, ride for three days on your bicycle. And I think we've been running in a caloric deficit because of the fancy dining the night before. We ate that food like we were goblins who had never been in a restaurant before. And then we staggered full of food and drink to the hotel and basically instantly fell asleep. It was lovely. But right before I went to bed, I was checking the next day. And this is where we ran into our first actual trouble. So right before bed, I look at the weather and there are extreme thunderstorm warnings for the following day. Like not, oh, it's gonna rain and it might lightning, but like shelter in place warning. It was very done to be continued cliffhanger, but the kind of cliffhanger that comes from the weather channel. Yup. So from this point on in the next morning, we actually had to deviate our plan significantly. So originally at the start of day four, we needed to go 80 miles. So the original plan was we have 100 mile day, then we have like a 70 mile day, then a 60 mile day, and then an 80 mile day. So big day, small day, small day, big day, small day, small day, big day was kind of the original plan. So the next morning we wake up because we decided to not worry about the storm until the morning and then decide what to do. You know, grab a couple of red bulls and stand out on the balcony and figure it out. Especially because we were in a place we could just stay here if we needed to. Like we had to just burn a day. We could just stay in this nice place and we wake up and the weather looks beautiful. It's just sunny, misty, warm and perfect and we're sitting on our little balcony and the sun is just rising. Right over the Mohawk River, I wanna say, we're right on some sort of waterway and you know, we come out on the balcony and the sun's shining down on us, but we're still checking the weather and it's still looking really questionable. Well I checked the weather and it's not even looking anymore. It is like. It's gonna hit. There is a storm and the hard part is it is easy to think about the weather when you're in one place, but when you're traveling and especially, remember we are traveling in the opposite direction for how most people do this trip because most people we learned on the road start in Buffalo and come across to New York City that way they're following the prevailing winds. So and they're basically doing mostly downhill. Like it's a very different type of route. So we had to do a lot of uphill to get started instead of at the end of our trip having a lot of downhill, but two, we had to go against the wind the entire time and weather would be coming toward us. Yeah, so you'd see clouds. And I figure out that if we continue on our path, the tornadoes and extreme dangerous weather would hit us about 40 miles into our travel and looking at the map, there is nothing. There is nowhere safe to stop around 30 to 50 miles out. So imagine there's no way to go. Like we would have been stuck like we had been the previous night, except it would have been tornadoes and dangerous wind and lightning instead of just rain. Hurricane-like conditions basically. It was to the point where on my iPhone there was warnings popping up and being like a heavy weather alert kind of thing. So if you ever do a trip like this one, like I cannot stress this enough, no matter what the weather forecast was, you check the weather every time you stop and continuously recalibrate based on that. And if you feel uncomfortable with something, you're probably right. I would play it safe in the absolute like, yeah, the worst that can happen is you end up staying too long in a town and it doesn't end up raining that hard. Yep, I know, you're in a town. But that's better than dying. And also, you know, if you're in a place that has stuff to do, like we were in a town where there was stuff, so it wouldn't have been the end of the world. I mean, even if we had to stay in our hotel room the whole time and just look at our phones. Or we had that gigantic, like three room suite. So it would have been fine. Anyway, so we, we get up and I see this. So we have breakfast and coffee in the room while I do logistics. And basically we made the call to burn one of our buffer days, but it seemed like we could make it 20 to 30 miles down the road without, like before it hit, no matter what. We could make it 40 if we pushed it, but that seemed like a risk. So I dug around and there's a town called Amsterdam that was about 20 miles down the road. And it was mentioned by the Scottish couple. They mentioned, they said something about there's this town where you can stay in a castle. And we're like, oh man, you know, Scotland, you've got all sorts of castles, you know? So we're just chatting and they had brought this up. And we're like, Amsterdam, isn't that where the, you know, armory slash castle thing? You look at this town in Google Maps and the first thing you see in any image is what looks like a giant castle. Yeah, so basically this town is tiny. This town is kind of split into two by the river, but it's this podunk little town, but it had an armory that was like in use until fairly recently. And there's a whole story where like a family bought it and tried to turn it into a bed and breakfast or a family residence and that failed and then a different family bought it. And now it is a bed and breakfast and residence. And wedding venue and, you know, basically a big tourist draw of this town, one of the only tourist draws of this town is there is a castle there. So we decided to go there. So we decide rather than doing a no travel day, getting 20 miles down the road, even though we're burning one of our buffer days, it means we have 20 fewer miles to do with the end in case we run into some other trouble. Cause, you know, we don't know, in hindsight, we know nothing went wrong, but you never know if something else would go wrong. So we decided to get as far down the road as we safely can and Amsterdam is the only way point we could reasonably reach. So it made perfect sense. So I call this castle and they are totally like they have open room. It's cheap. It's like a hundred bucks a night. We just decided to stay there. I made a reservation and thankfully almost every other place we were staying cause I booked all the hotels in advance for the whole trip. All the other hotels down the road with like one exception, one or two exceptions were best Westerns. They don't care best Westerns. I called them all like, okay, can I push the reservation back a day? And they're like, whatever. They literally no skin off their back. So we rearranged everything. We recalibrated the trip and we decided to go to Amsterdam on this day, just 20 miles. And then the next day, rather than recalibrating the rest of the trip, we just went 65 miles to Utica instead of 85 miles to Utica. Yeah, so the Utica best Western, we just said, can we move our reservation? They were like, yeah, sure. We got open rooms. That's fine. So meanwhile, you know, we're chatting with our friends on Discord like cause we got this whole morning to kill. We only have 20 miles to ride. 20 miles is like, I wouldn't even bring a water bottle about biking 20 miles in our normal life. It's like something we do in the city. That's like going to the West Side and back, basically. So 20 miles is like, in terms of the actual biking part of the day is like, you know, just totally cakewalk. And we get to the castle. Obviously they're very custom to cyclists. They have this whole procedure like, oh yeah, we'll take you in the back. Yup, they got a heated garage. Oh, it was great. But the worst part was getting to Amsterdam. It's still beautiful weather. There is no indication whatsoever. Sunny and misty and we're kind of like, oh man, we pass all these ploys and we were on the Erie Canal for a big segment and it's just beautiful. But when we roll into Amsterdam and we talk to the locals. The clouds are looming. Everyone in town mentions, like without us prompting them like, oh yeah, that storm's coming. Storm coming. Well, we were gonna be a big blow tonight. Well, we were sitting in this place and we didn't see the hot dog because there's nothing opening. Everything was closed. It was Sunday, I wanna say. No, it was Monday. No, it was Monday. So we're in the town and I overhear someone on their phone and they are literally like telling their contractor, yo, you have got to bring all the tarps and cover the roof now. We've got an hour before like the storm of the century rolls through. Like the whole town is like a buzz with talk of the storm. So we're chowing down on our hot dogs and making conversations. We're talking to our friends because we have friends who live upstate and we mentioned like, oh, hey, we're gonna stay in this castle in Amsterdam and they're really into the castle but multiple people warn us quoting directly from the chat log, nothing is open on Mondays in Amsterdam. Yeah. That town for whatever, Monday is the day nothing is open in that town. Well, I mean restaurants, restaurants even in LIC and in New York, everybody has to have a rest day but restaurants do a lot of business on the weekends. But this whole town shuts down on Mondays because weekends are when all the weddings happen and all the people come to this town to do a thing. So even the hotel we're staying in, when we check in, they're like really apologetic because they have this beautiful, like it's hard to describe it. Let's just see a picture of it. A feasting hall. It looks like a feasting hall from a stereotype of a medieval castle. It's got suits of armor everywhere and everything is gilded and they're like, we're so sorry but the kitchen is not open on Mondays in the hotel. There were two places in the entire town we could eat unless we were willing to go over the river to like this far away other part of town where there was some fast food but we didn't want to go over there because the storm was coming in. We didn't want to get stuck. Yeah. And plus our friends were like, Amsterdam, it's like dodgy and you won't find anything particularly inspiring. But the castle was beautiful. It was super cool. There were all these old furniture. It looked like something from the 1930s or even like the turn of the century and there were like a organ and it's just, it's a super interesting place and like hella cheap for what it was. I think that was probably, you know how I talk about like, oh, that was the best meal. That was the coolest thing. This was probably the most unique lodging we went. Like this was, it wasn't necessarily the- The place in Syracuse was the second most unique though when we get to that day. Yeah, but this was definitely like pretty cool in terms of something we kind of decided on the spur of the moment and it really added to the memories of this trip. And so we finish our lunch and then we get, we went to the gas station to pick up a bunch of crunchy snacks. The gas station was so dodgy. It was an incredibly small town by highway gas station. Half the stuff on the shelves is actually expired. Like I was, like I was rooting through to find like the unexpired peanuts. Well, anyway, we picked up a ton of stuff at the gas station. I got some like sweet checks mix and a bunch of other junk. And so we were just like, we were all kitted out for the rest of the ride. And so we took our hall back to our little room and just kind of hunkered down. And sure enough, it starts to blow and it starts to rain. The one thing that we didn't do on this trip is we didn't bring any technology. We didn't bring books or entertainment. All we had were our two cell phones. I almost, I almost brought my laptop because I, again, I work in gaming and like this project was going on in terms of, you know, crunch time for a while. And so I was like, oh, I should really be like checking in with work. But Ram was like, don't bring your laptop. And I am so glad I did not bring my laptop because one, I would have been worried about hurting it. And two, I'm glad I just decided to like fuck off from work for a week. It was one of the most meaningful trips I've ever been on. So it was like, you know, it was fun to just hang out then like I'd check in on work stuff or anything. Yeah, I did do one meeting while we were in this hotel room. I checked in and I had my Monday meeting with my boss and with some of the other our team about our animation pipeline. And so I was sitting in a chair for about 45 minutes, just chatting about motion capture and stuff like that. They were a little torqued with me for taking time off, but you know, I don't regret it. But my minor regret is what I should have brought and I realized it on the trip. And if we do this again, I will, is just a lightning to HDMI adapter so you could stream stuff from the phone because we couldn't watch some Star Trek a little bit or hung out in the evening. It was really worth it to watch stuff on the phone, especially if you might get stuck in a town for an entire day on a trip like this. Especially if you take two weeks to do it instead of one week. So at night, there's nowhere to eat. There's nowhere to get food. There is one pizza joint. So I put it in order for a pizza. And I have to go pick it up. They won't even deliver. And this pizza joint is also like the only bar in town. And as far as I can tell, the entire town is in this bar drinking and having pizza. And... There was that guy trying to sell somebody on a Bitcoin or something? I've seen in a movie where someone who's not from there walks into the town, whatever, and everyone gets quiet. Everyone gets quiet for a second when I walk in and they all start talking to each other again. And then it's like, Joey Jojo's trying to sell me on his multi-level marketing something. Oh my God, this local influencer guy who swears he's big and has a podcast is trying to sweet talk the bartender into doing some sort of business deal with him. And the bartender like... He got no time for that. Basically makes a beeline over to me to get away from this guy. Would you like pizza? I can't get to pizza. And he like sat with me to get away from this guy and was really, really sad that I was leaving with the pizza rather than staying. And providing social cover. But yeah, so I stayed back in the room. I was just kind of, you know, feeling nice and calm and a little bit toasty. So I decided to wait for the pizza. And yeah, we came back. And the thing about doing this with your partner is you spend a lot of alone time together. And it's a really good bonding time. It's like not even like you're talking constantly on the road, but there's something about just either riding together in silence or just like sitting next to each other, poking at your phones where like you're together, you know? So like riding in tandem is something really nice. Anyway, that was kind of what the day was. It's just spending a lazy day together with just our phones for entertainment and just chatting. It was a nice time. But it was funny is you'd think like, oh, we'd be tired and we were like really looking forward to a rest day. I was kind of just antsy to get back on the road too. Like it felt weird. We didn't get tired out from 20 miles. Such a short distance felt weird until the storm rolled in and the storm was fucking not. It was definitely, I wouldn't like, you know, I was complaining about, oh, it rained so much on the way to Schenectady. That was just a rainstorm. This was like legit tornadoes knocked trees over and stuff. While we were mooching around in town, we met some other cyclists. And we thought a restaurant was open because they were eating outside the restaurant. But no, the restaurant was closed. They just stopped there. Oh, they were the camping type. They were the cause, like I said, we did it the bougie way. We did it the way where we were like, oh, well, not really bougie at Best Western's like 110 bucks. But like, okay, compared to people who do, what is that gravel packing compared to gravel packing people, it is like we were the height of luxury. We stayed on like a mattress every night, but these folks, they had their tent and their camping equipment and we were like storms coming. They were like, we know. Yeah, but they weren't sure where they were gonna shelter and they were trying to figure out like how far to go down the road because I knew the direction they were going, there is nowhere to stop. Well, I don't know what happened to them, but I wish them luck and I really, you know, they started out and it was kind of like, well, good luck. I hope, you know, safe travels kind of thing. So it was good. It was really, you know, I went goblin mode on my snacks and I think this was kind of a blessing in disguise because we got to stay at the cool castle and also our butts recovered, our legs recovered, all our sore muscles. We took that ibuprofen, got that CBD and we felt a lot better. We were replenished. We definitely didn't need a rest day. We didn't need it, but I sure in hell enjoyed it. And this is where sort of planning a trip like this again. The only thing I would really change is we would not go all the way to Poughkeepsie day one, not so much because 100 miles of the first day sucks. Actually, 100 miles the first day was really refreshing because you get so many of the miles out of the way. Doing the hardest part upfront or at least like the most substantial part upfront, it feels like, you know, like you checked your biggest task off the to-do list. But I think instead I would recalibrate to spend the first night like doing easier ride and stop at like Terry Town or something. And then that way when you come around Albany, either stay in Albany or stay in Amsterdam, but not have to do like, we wouldn't have to do what was going to be the 85 mile stretch to Utica from Schenectady that we'd originally planned. That is probably the most desolate stretch in the entire trip, that area. The Utica, Amsterdam to Utica. Yeah, that was that day. So we woke up and it was cold and rainy. So day five, we wake up and it's chilly. It's sprinkling off and on. It's a little bit windy, but even though we have to go 65 miles, there's almost no elevation gains, basically just flats because now we're upstate and it's mostly either a long highways on a separated path or along the area canal. So we just started going. So basically once we turned west, we started to get away from like that kind of cat scale mountainous or even like the way to Hudson where it was kind of like soft undulating hills. It's just flat. It's very flat. The wind is coming at your face like 90% of the time. So you got to be prepared to fight against the wind quite a bit, but it was definitely the day after a storm. Things would drizzly, it was overcast and we were along the stone dust trails. I put on my one waterproof like warm shell on Jersey instead of my regular bike Jersey. I was double layered. Yeah, I put my casual, like I actually took one of my pieces of casual clothes and put it on over my Jersey. So it definitely got chillier. And so we're biking. It's fairly easy biking, but it's not super pleasant. This is what most of the trail is actually like and that you're just along the area canal and you pass canal stuff and locks and like river navigating equipment and things. And there's not as many of those like bed and breakfast for fancy people from the city coming up for a weekend. Definitely isn't a tourist attraction place. This is agricultural areas, industrial areas. It's actually kind of cool cause I feel like I saw so many of the different faces of my state. I mean, I'm born and raised in New York state, but Western New York and then I've been living in like the city for going on two decades. That middle part of upstate, I've pretty much only ever driven past, flown over or ridden a train through. Yeah, so basically this was seeing at least what is along what was originally New York's central like vein of commerce. It's artery where goods just traverse the state. And so you saw factories, you saw locks, you saw just cornfields upon cornfields. And like we stopped for lunch. You looked up like, where's there a town about Midway? This is the section of the map I made where there really are no places to stop. I had flagged two ice cream shops that I knew were near the trail that cyclists tend to stop at because when in doubt, ice cream is actually a really good meal on a cycle. Unless you're super lactose intolerant, which brings the lactate into it anyway. It is, talk about calorie density and also refreshing. You got your fats, you got your sugars, it's good. But we had to leave the trail and like bike off a ways into a town to get food. And we basically stopped in this town. Like we stopped at this giant Amish supermarket. Yeah, kind of in the middle of nowhere. And it was, it was like full on Amish country. And there were people with head, head hats, like those little bonnet things. And they rode around on scooters. Like they had bikes, but the bikes you could push, push with your. Cause yeah, yeah, that culture. You can't have a bike with, with pedals. Yeah, women can use a little scooter basically. Yeah, so women can use the scoot, scoot. And we went there and we got some really solid submarine sandwiches. And I must say, as somebody who grew up in Western New York, I am disappointed. Just like how pizza, I know this is sacrilege. As like somebody who considers myself a New Yorker now. I sometimes like the pizza and subs that I grew up in my Italian and Irish small town in Western New York. Well, cause there's two things going on there with subs, New York city can't make a sub for it's to save itself. That is, that is the one thing that New York city cannot do is get you a proper submarine sandwich. Philly can do it. Basically all of Pennsylvania can do it. All of upstate New York can do it. All of Michigan can do it. What you call a grinder, whatever. Ohio can make subs. It's the Italian style sandwich on a big long bread with possible sesame seeds or not. I still think you could make it to Bella's in Manhattan and like change everything. I think you could make bank if you did a DeBella's franchise in Manhattan. But honestly, it's like those were good sandwiches and we just stopped at the Amish bar. I got some snacks. I got like wasabi peas and... Definitely upstate. I think we spent like $12 total on that meal that was twice as big as we thought it was gonna be and taking the soda was not optional. That was just part of it. It was just take this mountain or I guess ginger ale. I was like ginger ale time. And I was like, yeah, I could use the calories. That's the interesting thing about bike touring is like, okay, I must admit part of the reason I am so active. Every time I stopped, I was eating constantly until we started moving again. And I was also eating pretty constantly while we were biking. As somebody who is like got a reputation for being a total cooking monster, do you not part of the reason, not the whole reason? Like a minor reason you exercise so much. Is it not so you can enjoy whatever food you want to even though we're like middle age? I started doing like running cardio in college because literally I wanted to be able to eat garbage with no consequences. That's it. It's basically like I want to eat good food. Me and Ken had that whole path where we would get up in the morning every day and go and trudge the half mile through the cold to the gym and run in that freezing cold eighth mile like circumference track hanging in the ceiling of RIT's gym just so I could eat garbage all day. Yeah, but like so exercise is in a lot of ways like biking is its own reward, but I can't deny that eating all the cookies that doesn't hurt either. So we were at the stage of our trip where eating all the cookies sounded like a really good idea. We would just eat constantly. If we stopped, we'd get out the snacks and just be constantly shoving into our faces. It was like if somebody stopped by, it would look like Cookie Monster. Like it was these two goblins hunched down a park bench just like eating pretzels and potato chips and stuff. And this whole day, the cadence, it was beautiful vistas like everywhere we went and we'd basically just every now and now. That's a canal though. It was very flat, but like this was the section of the canal where you really saw canal as infrastructure. And it kind of made me be like, huh, I wish we still had that. And the cadence of our trip was basically we're kind of cold and kind of wet. And every now and then we'd, the trail would like cut into a town and every town would have like a little monument sign that's like here's something about what happened in this town and there'd be a little gazebo and we would stop in the gazebos and we tried to squeeze out our, because it started raining pretty kind of like this connected leg where it started really pouring after a while. Off and on, but we timed it well. I'd say two thirds of the times the rain picked up, we were able to find shelter and wait it out and then start again when the rain stopped. But we went like gazebo to gazebo through these towns and we'd stop in the gazebo, bring out our clothes, eat some snacks. And then when the rain stopped, we just set back out. So we passed this big neon sign for Utica and then right away there was a little marina. We knew what we were looking for because of Google Maps were like, once we passed the marina, we knew we were basically at our exit. Right onto the miracle mile where this old 1970s looking best Western was. Oh my God, Utica is a hard place to stop in because the trail just goes past Utica. But all the hotels are quite a ways away from the trail on just regular ass streets with no sidewalks that are not really navigable. So we stayed at a best Western that was just off the highway that as a result was really close to the trail. It was like walkable. Like literally walk 10 minutes from the marina that's right on the canal to this best Western. It's just a crust, a little bridge. We rode on the sidewalks because they were zero pedestrians and I wasn't going to ride on that street. It would have been a strode. It would have been a challenge to stay like in Utica at the nice hotels. Don't ride on the strode. The strode is terrifying. This was, I haven't stayed at a best Western on purpose since like I was in high school. So I don't really think much about it but I booked a bunch of these best Westerns. This was the first one because they were the only hotels in town on a lot of the rest of the trip. And I got to say in retrospect, not only was that brilliant but I will seek out best Westerns on cycling trips because unlike regular hotels, best Westerns do not give a fuck if you have a bike. They will leave you alone. Whatever you're up to is your business in the hotel. Don't trash the room or poop in the hallway. You're good, they're very chill. They're flexible and every one of them has a washer and dryer laundromat though this is where America gets weird. So this best Western has a washer and dryer that take quarters. There's no change machine. And when I go to the front desk, they don't have change. There is literally no way to get change. Literally no way. So it's like the nice lady helped us. The only way we were able to get change is that I was desperate and I was asking her, like, look, you got to help us out. There's like, we got to do laundry. We're on this bike. Nice front desk housekeeper lady was like, oh, the front desk guy couldn't help us either. Oh, right, right. The house key called the housekeeper because she's the only other employee they have and she happened to have a few dollars worth of quarters in her car that she was willing to trade to us. Yeah. And so we had this. So if you go on a trip like this, bring like $20 worth of quarters and rolls because there is literally no way to get quarters in America unless you get really lucky. We got really lucky. But I gotta say. You were almost screwed. I gotta say best Western, the thing is, it's got like this minimum viable standard of quality, which is like it's a budget hotel, but it's also really relaxed. Everybody was really nice and it served our purpose like totally well. But you gotta bring quarters. I'm telling you, there is no way to get quarters anywhere in this country. So instead of putting our chamois in the dryer, I came up with a good solution how to dry them in the closet by the radiator. And we put our incredibly soaked shoes on the radiator too. Well, that was something we started doing every night. We put, we take the soles out of the SPDs and we'd just stick them on the radiator like kind of balanced and we put our like our important socks and things in the area and we just dry everything out as best we could. And nothing got 100% dry. But it was close enough and it was, it avoided any problems with like, you know, chafing and stuff like that. Everything was nice and clean. Really just bring at least one more shandy than you're gonna need. So that when you do laundry, the laundry you do on any given day doesn't need to be dry for the next day. Also don't plan on having great weather. Cause like I think half of the days on this trip we got rained on to some extent, which was fine. Like I, we're both hardy individuals. We were, you know, we kind of rolled with it, but like, roll with it was kind of like my slogan. I kept saying, yeah, we'll roll with it. And that can be like our cliche during the trip. It's like, I don't know, but we'll roll with it. Now there was fast food and stuff, but we ended up doing the fanciest place we could find to eat nearby. Cause we were again, like hungry to the point of pain. So we ate at the marina. And the marina had the same kind of food as the chop house. I'm going to say it wasn't as good. It was definitely overpriced, like okay food. It wasn't bad. It was weird to old people. It's that, you know, that kind of restaurant where you only see old people eating at it. And it's like, well, to do old people, but I don't think. They go park their boat and then they have a little glass of Chardonnay. And some soup. But it's the place that like every old person goes to hang out and it's fancy-ish, but the food is good-ish. Yeah, I liked it. I mean, I was desperate and would eat anything. And the food wasn't bad. Like, don't get me wrong. The food was perfectly fine, but the previous two days we had had fantastic food. We had been spoiled to some extent. Well, no, the previous day we had pizza and hot dogs, but I couldn't- The pizza was pretty good though. Cause that was an upstate- In a royal setting. Think if it's the only pizza joint in town, in a town like that, it's pretty good pizza. It was definitely, listen, everything. Down to the Czechs mix I bought at the Dadi gas station tasted like amperage. I was in heaven putting food in my mouth. I was like, the subs from the Amish people, give me that food. I just didn't care and I was happy to be there. So we made it and it was a very nice day. And at this point, like after the end of this day, I remember we moved on from our thinking of, this is going better than I expected. Everything's working out to zero concerns. Like the rest of this trip is going to be so easy. Like we are locked in golden and we were right. Like this is when we got into our groove. Like we had a full rhythm. We had learned the minor, like here is how, like unpack everything, repack everything. We started to get into- How to organize our panniers for like maximum efficiency so you know where everything is located. I mean, like I'm the kind of person, like in that movie, Emily, where the whole thing about dumping your purse out and organizing it and then, you know, putting it back in. That's how I felt like organizing anything from a messenger bag to my panniers. It's just kind of like, oh, I'm going to like, just catalog all my stuff and make sure it's all there. And it's put exactly right. And I think that it's not that we didn't encounter any adversity. Cause obviously we just told you about the storm. That was a huge part of it. And we got rained on probably about like at least a third of the time. So I do think we had, we had by this time kind of acclimated, you know? Honestly? This is like, oh, now this is our routine. We wake up and we put our body through its paces. We hit the point where, but for life and money and other circumstances, like we could do this for an indefinite amount of time. Like that amount of rough mileage per day, that amount of resting and we could just go forever. Like the only thing stopping us was having lives to get back to at that point. So day six was another one of those perfect days. The weather was nice and we just had 63 miles to get to Syracuse with basically no elevation gain. And that was honestly, I think that might've been the easiest day. Maybe, yeah. It was the easiest day of full riding at least. Around 60-ish, we did our traditional seat. We always have like caffeine in the morning and I know it's a stereotype, but like Red Bull gives you wings. So it was kind of like we stop and pound two Red Bulls at some gas station and just enjoy the sunlight. But this was the most consistent day, like the weather was sunny, it was warm again and the trail was basically just, almost all of it was the same. It was just a little stone dust path that went along the canal and we passed so many bike tourists. Like we passed just dozens and dozens of people touring and doing the exact same trip we were doing. Mostly in the opposite direction. I think only one group passed us at any point in this trip going the same direction we were going. I thought we went into a, no, he was also going to New York. Okay, never mind. We met a lot of people coming our way, but no one passed us because we were going very fast except way back a few days prior, there was a giant group of people who were heading north toward Montreal that we met on the trip to Poughkeepsie. They were a lot faster than us. But that was the only one. Otherwise like no one really passed us at any point. They were from the Netherlands. I remember because I was talking to them and their jerseys were like Modan, the artist, and I was like, oh, that's so cool. Anyway, yeah, so Syracuse, it was kind of whatever. Bike for 45 minutes on a straight path through the woods next to the canal that's just picturesque and then it crosses a road and then do another 45 minutes of the exact same thing. And then there's a town and then another hour of the exact same thing. Like it was the most consistent day to the point that the whole day almost blurs together. Yeah, yeah. So that one, like I don't have a ton to say about. We saw a lot of little towns. We crossed some locks. We saw lots of turtles. There was like, we were like, get out of the road turtle and we'd scootle some of them. This is also where we started passing a lot of aqueducts because the original Erie Canal and the renovated Erie Canal both had areas where they needed a river that would otherwise cross the canal to not intersect with the canal because otherwise the river would just become the canal and the other side of it would dry up. And so as we got... Or the canal would flood the other side of it. So we biked and walked our bikes over a lot of like really old infrastructure that still works. Yeah. And we also passed through a bunch of towns where we were following the old Erie Canal which in many parts is just walled off. Yeah, or it goes like it's basically filled in or there are some cases where it's just like a little mucky patch in the woods. Like there's this little thing covered with algae and it's like bright neon green and nobody would ever boat on it ever. But then other places it's like, you know, it's quite picturesque. So anyway, once we got nearer to Syracuse it started to be paved again. It's not stone dust. And we could tell we were starting to get near a city. And what's cool is around Syracuse there's this really awful strode there but they built the canal, like the bike path, this New York State Greenway. They built it in the middle of this strode. So there's basically just like a two-way bike lane between the two parts of the highway. And at least for cyclists. That's kind of how they do it in Europe. Some places are, you know, it's like... In some places, like in Australia it's just like where the shoulder would be. There's just a bike path or just bike in the shoulder but the shoulder's nice. Yeah, so there's two ways. There's the bike on the side of the road like the shoulder style. And in some places they actually have the shoulder. Like kind of near the North County Trailway on that ride to Poughkeepsie. There's this area where you're going along the highway but you're separated by like a mediate, like a fence from the actual highway. And you're on like a glorified shoulder. And basically once you get to nearer Syracuse area you're the opposite. You're going in the middle between the two lanes of traffic. And I mean, like it's more than two lanes. It's like one of those God-awful suburban roads that where, you know, the Miracle Mile where all the like the Kmart and like there was actually there was a lot of like delicious looking Chinese food and stuff along the way. And I was kind of like, mm, Sichuan food. But, you know, we did stop in that outside of town. We had to make it to downtown. Yep, and we ended up staying at this place that was like an old temple that was converted to a bougie hotel. Like a synagogue. It was, it had a Hebrew on the outside and apparently the congregation had moved to a different building, like a bigger building that was like a few blocks away. And they had taken this old, you know, kind of like retrofitting an old church or other kind of religious building into being a hotel. And so we basically stayed at this hotel inside a synagogue. So it was really nice. I want to say it was run by Hyatt. Oh yeah, it was one of those like cross branded like it's part of that network. And when we rolled in, it's another one of those places where I'm not sure about the bikes. And then when we get there, there was another group of touring cyclists who were already there. A previous group had just left that morning and more and more cyclists rolled in over the course of the night. Like this place is definitely a, everyone who does this trip stops in Syracuse and stays in this area. So it's fascinating too, because one thing that this riding on the greenway really brought home to me is because they, you know, New York wouldn't make an infrastructure project without some form of incentive. Like, okay, people are really going to enjoy this or there's going to be like, you know, usually there's a financial incentive behind infrastructure. Or corruption, could be corruption. Yeah, or corruption, whatever. I'm like, you know, Cuomo made this whole plan happen, but I hate him, but I like his bike path. But anyway, I noticed that every town that had the path through it has been experiencing increased tourism. And in some cases, almost predominantly catering toward people going along this trail. So I thought that was really cool. And the fact that this is maybe not a main tourist thing, but it definitely is a tourist attraction. It was kind of a neat revelation for me. Yeah. So we have our night, we eat at this little local towny place. We're basically, we're staying, we didn't want to stay in places that were too far away from the trail because that's a pain. So we stayed like basically on the edge of the college town instead of in the downtown proper. And there's a lot of college towny type of restaurants there that were crowded with college kids yelling at each other. Very alumni grill kind of atmosphere, you know? Like, you know, where you get your food when you are a sophomore and mooching around at 11 o'clock at night. So we headed down the road a little bit to like what is clearly the place that people who actually live there and not necessarily the college crowd eat. Is this a little restaurant called what PD's? So yeah, just a weird aside. So I was talking about this trip. Oh, well, I wasn't even talking about the trip. I found out weeks later that one of my coworkers, one of the QA people was from Syracuse. And other people were going to this game convention in Syracuse. I said, they were talking about restaurants. They said, oh, go to Phoebe's. We ate there. And he's like, how did you know about Phoebe's? I'm from Syracuse. So it's like basically apparently it's locally notable and that people from Syracuse actually go there. And it's very young. It's a lot like a secret breakfast in Boston. Yeah, for anime Boston. So plus one to that. And then we just kind of again took a nice shower, washed our hair and hung our clothes up to dry in the closet on a hanger. And now we're good to go. Like we're near the end of the trip. We don't need to do any more laundry. Like we're not even filling the water bottles or the camelbacks all the way. Like we're hitting you with a line. We've hit our stride. We know our good pacing. We know how much effort this kind of thing takes. And we kind of within certain boundaries. Like again, if events were to stray too far outside of what we planned for, I think we'd be in a little bit more of a tight spot. But we're pretty good. But we're so little is going wrong and we're past all the desolate segments. Yeah, we're to the point where if something went really wrong, I could call up my parents and they'd be there in a couple of hours. Yep. Or I could like, we could actually like call a devil car with Uber to get us and like rent a car and deal with it a lot of ways. There were outs, you know. So we're starting to get to the point where in a day or so we're going to be hit in the place I used to play for sports teams when I was in high school. Yep. So the one thing we were a little bit worried about is the weather. It didn't look as bad. It wasn't like huge storm warning. It was scheduled. It looked like it was going to be freezing cold and pouring rain the next day, like unseasonably cold. So we were like, maybe we will stay in or like at worst we ride 70 miles the last day and have my mom pick us up in Rochester, yada, yada. But we ended up deciding to chance it and set up bright and early in the morning after a hearty continental breakfast. Day seven, the last full riding day, 74 miles. It took us under eight hours to do it. Little bit of elevation gain and this was honestly the most uncomfortable day. This was the challenge day. Not because it was a difficult ride but because the weather was. It was freezing cold and it rained constantly. The entire day. It was just drizzly and the kind of drizzle that just chills you to the bone. And so we were riding out of the city of Syracuse. Syracuse is a pretty big city and there were some pretty cool buildings to those. No, actually in the building, I'd say the first 20 miles, like it basically follows something. Actually it was really nice. It follows a path a lot like the river walk in San Antonio at first. Like it kind of just goes through like downtown Syracuse and it goes through like. Next to the water on a little path. It goes through the neighborhoods and it goes over this bridge. Yeah. And then it's just along the waterfront and beautiful. It's a preserve, isn't it? I want to say that like it's a place where wild birds are. And like it's starting to get into the Finger Lake regions. I want to say that this wasn't the river. This was near a lake. So we're both going along the canal and kind of skirting close to some of the Finger Lake. Oh yeah, that very beginning bit before we went over the New York state fairgrounds was Onondaga Lake. Onondaga. That's right. So we did this short segment around the lake and some of the photos I took, don't even do it justice. It was. It was gorgeous. It was really nice. It was just, you know, we're, it's quiet. We're just like going along this kind of marshland in the, you know, the sky is, you know, slightly overcast, but it's, it's morning and we're feeling fresh and bright. And then we get to the fairgrounds. That was kind of interesting. So we go to those fairgrounds. I'd never have either actually. But so we, we cruise by the state fairgrounds and kind of mooch around through there. Then we're on some country roads. Then it starts to get a little bit rainier. Yep. And it's just, it's cold to the point that we just, we stop talking, we're soaking wet, our teeth are chattering and we're just powering through. So this isn't, this isn't quite like going into Schenectady because Schenectady, we were laughing. Yeah. This is more, we put the grim face of stoicism on and just be like, we would stop. Actually, we had a pretty good ratio of being able to figure out when the storm was coming. We'd feel the wind pick up and I'd say, hey, can we go to shelter and eat some pretzels? And so that's what we did. You know, we pull over and kind of, kind of wait out the rain. And it was fun, but the most important at one point near the end, we had like 15 miles to go and we were cold enough to where it was starting to be a problem. So we leave the trail and go over this bridge and along a road and there's a McDonald's. There's a McDonald's right by there. We're like, okay, we can't like stop, stop here, but let's just go into the McDonald's and get some coffee and just warm up a bit. I'm so glad we did that. And we, you know, again, this was one of the times where we kind of predicted the squall was coming because it would pour and then it would stop. We just left the bikes outside in the pouring rain while we were in the McDonald's. They look so just desolate. So like, you know, not to anthropomorphize my trusty seed, but like they look so sad out by the picnic tables by the McDonald's because they're just like getting absolutely poured on. And then we finally get to the hotel and I actually like look at the bikes. I hadn't really, like we're just powering through when we get. We remember what we were riding through too. This is when the stone dust stops and we were literally going through the woods on like these little muddy chutes. And just again, totally just like stone face, like let's go as fast as we can because there's no stopping. We got to, you know, what was this? The old Erie Canal song being like, you know, miles to go. I think my bike had more than a like pounds of mud. It was so dirty. We were so filthy dirty. And we pull up into Palmyra, right? Which is our stop. Yeah, Palmyra is this little town, place I want to say we played in soccer when I was a kid. And the best Western we're staying in is actually like a couple of miles down the road. Yeah, so we're staying in another best Western. We pull into town, this little town called Palmyra, and the sun just comes out. All the rain stops, the wind stops. It's beautiful. It starts getting warm. You see this just like, this just incredibly disheveled couple in like neon bike wear, just like staggering in. And we looked like we had been through the trenches. So we found a little cafe, I think it was a cafe aqueduct and they had, again, maybe I'm talking up the food too much because I was hungry as heck. Well, we come in and we're like, would it be a problem if we ate here because we stayed here and we're wet? We are so gross right now. And they're like, oh, sure, that's fine. And we had red wine and lasagna and it was excellent. The server was kind of dumbstruck where they were like, oh, where'd you buy from? They were like Queens. Well, we were just like, you know, we came from Syracuse this morning and it rained on us. And she's like, oh, today it was nasty. But I got to say the hardest segment of this entire ride was after having had a beer and a bunch of lasagna and warmed up in this place going back out into the like, coldening again weather. Oh no, it was just, we were really cold. It was, the thing is, it was like the end is in sight. Kind of like, you see- But having to leave this warm restaurant, get back on our bikes and bike a few miles down a highway to a best Western. It was a country highway. The thing is it was a lot like that hill up into Hudson. It absolutely sucked. But at the same time, the end was in sight. The sun was setting, it was getting cold again. I was like shaking. Oh, my lips were blue. I was like, you know- And we get to the last West Western. We're like in the hypothermia territory. And I think there was like, there was some like, there was some sort of like civic event happening there. So there were a ton of like- Old people. Well-to-do looking old people dressed up in like business wear, having a conference. And we just like, come in. Again, the bike barbarians have arrived. And like I said, at least a lot of the places we stayed along the way, like the castle, it's like the bike barbarians regularly rolled in. And so they have kind of a procedure to deal with them. So yeah, that was kind of like us. It's like everybody's doing their normal hotel thing. And then like these two goblins show up. It took us nine hours of saddle time to go 102 miles on day one. It took us eight hours of saddle time to go the 73 miles to Palmyra. Yeah, well, again, through the woods. Through the woods and the mud and the rain carrying pounds of extra weight. Yeah. So. And that Best Western had a hot tub. Yes. The hot tub. That was the other thing. We, we, we again, got a- It was such a weird Best Western too. This hotel is just like on either side of it or just regular houses. Yeah. It was one, it was less like the 1970s motel style more like the country in and suites kind of like the places we get at a magfest or those, those like a timeshare sort of situations. So anyway, we, we shower, we take a hot tub bath and get all nice and warm. And basically celebrated. We were done like the next day. Yeah. 26 miles to your granddad's house. And that's it. Like we're there. We're done. We made it. Like we said, 20 miles for us is not that big a trip. And like 20 miles was the shortest time that was going to the castle. This was only 25 miles. And then we have accomplished it. So because the rest day, instead of going all the way, the initial plan was to bike to my childhood home. But- So we went out a full day on this segment. The original plan, we would have biked like- 70 ish. I think it was 74 ish miles to like Rochester proper. But because- And then we would have biked an additional distance down all the way to Leroy. Yeah. Like off the trail on a different trail. So because this is day eight, this is the day that we're going to have the memorial. It was less of a service. I mean, my family is not super religious, but it was like a memorial kind of remembrance day where we all got together and had a barbecue and we had like our deceased relatives' ashes and all kind of said our goodbyes because we hadn't really gotten to do that during the pandemic properly. Yep. So this last day, we too, we woke up late because we didn't have to go that far. It was freezing cold. So freaking cold. And so I saw the temperature and then I'm like, okay, I dried all my clothes. I hung them up. I am going to put on all my jerseys at once. I was literally- Yup, I wore two by jerseys and a heat texture. I wore two layers of long sleeve, two layers of short sleeve and my sports bra. And I couldn't really have anything to put on my legs, but my legs are a little bit more hearty than my upper body for some reason. So I was just like, I'm going to keep my core warm, just keep moving. And hopefully, it was in the 40s, I want to say. It was like 50 at most. So it was not rainy, but it was overcast and very chilly. It was fully fall by this point. Yup, like when we got near Fairport where the fancy boats come and go and where you'd had the thing with your granddad before, like his famous 90th birthday party. So we set out, we go back through Palmyra, we get back on the trail and really it's a pretty simple last ride. And the thing that was the coolest to me was when I started seeing Familiar Places, where it started to be like Rochester, such and such. Or I started to see places I've driven past in the car. Specifically when we got off the actual Erie Canal like trailway that we'd been taking this whole time and just got on a bike path that goes through like Pittsburgh. So the cool thing, right, is a couple of these stops, like Fairport and Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh, I want to say, is where we launched the barge from. We went by the restaurant, Aladdin's, where we got the Greek food and I guess Mediterranean food. And we basically, I was like, oh, I know this place. I know this place, so we're getting close. And I'm starting to feel that like we're in the home stretch kind of feeling. And so in Fairport we stopped and we got a little coffee. That was kind of our thing, get coffee, warm up. We stopped at a gelato place, but like heck, we were gonna eat gelato on a morning like that. So it was a nice little coffee shop, we had that. So once we get to Pittsburgh, we start to deviate from the Erie Canal path into the woods. But it's like, again, single track mountain bike trail. It's not an actual- This was a full on mountain bike trail. Like this is a trail that towny, like people who live in Pittsburgh, like kids on their mountain bikes will just ride on. We actually saw some guys and they passed us and they were definitely going and we saw them going down the trail, like jumping over roots and stuff. No road bike could navigate this trail. This is the part where people who are into racy bikes, you would die. I actually had to walk my bike in a couple places where it was like too many routes. I was happy with how well I acquitted myself without suspensions. Oh, and with panniers, all this other stuff. So I was actually pretty proud of myself too, but like the coolest thing is you ever have those dreams where you see a familiar place but it's like there's a secret tunnel in it or like, you know, let's like, oh, the library from school, but there's like a magical back room or something like that. Like I'd been, I think I'd been to some of those strip malls. I didn't know there was a bike path. I know a hundred percent you've been to that Wegmans. But I didn't know there was just a bike path behind it that actually connected to things. So we're in the woods and we can see glimpses through the trees of this shopping plaza that I go to all the time with my family. And I was like, I'm in the secret tunnel. This is amazing. So we know we're close. We've gotten to the point where if we blew a tire we could walk. And so we found a bunch of these little back bike roads and then I see the intersection to granddad's house. And then I see granddad street and then I collapse on the lawn and we roll around laughing because we've made it. Like it comes out with her new dog and everybody's there. And everybody was just like, I can't believe you did that. Like my whole family is there. And like I said, my granddad he's passed away two years ago and he actually didn't die of COVID. It was just, he was very old and he passed away before the pandemic. And it was my uncle. Actually two of my uncles live in his house now but it was so cool to have kind of completed the journey that was like it, the idea began at his birthday party on the canal and then it finished after I'd biked almost the entirety of the canal and ended up back at the house I know so well. And so after that it was like we changed our clothes and put some sweaters on and it became regular life again. We were back there. Just shy of 500 miles of biking over the course of a week to get there. So it was really a cool trip and I feel like it tested our metal in certain ways. But not in the way I expected because it was like, and I'm not just being flabbergasted about this, it was really easy compared to what we expected. Yeah, I thought I would be more physically tired but actually my body, you know. You had told us like after that day where we rested in Rochester, if you had told us you've got to bike home, like bike the way you came, we could have done it. We've done it with no trouble. I feel like some of our friends coughed Scott. He was a bit worried that we were not prepared for it in the way that like we hear about people going out into the woods to hike with their sneakers and stuff and we're like, oh man, you're gonna like fuck your feet up, watch out. You're gonna get hypothermia or dehydration, you know. And I worried about that a little bit myself. Like, am I going to be faced with these challenges? Am I going to be weak? All I could think was this was so easy that we could have done this much earlier in our lives with much less training and preparation and had a great time. But at the same time, it also felt like it was the culmination of a lot of stuff for us personally. I'm not speaking for anybody else, but for us during the pandemic, there was kind of a silver lining. Like for example, during the food shortages, we ended up reconnecting with some of our local friends because we all started this like food sharing thing from a restaurant supply co, or like the fact that we couldn't hang out with people and all we had to do was just physical activities, you know. So it was like, we'd ride for miles and miles to stay sane. And this was almost like the reward of all that work. But it wasn't just work. It's like work can also seem fun. And this was, like I said, it's also like incredibly romantic if you're doing it with your partner or spouse. I would not have been as nearly as like doing it by myself would have been a very different experience. I mean, I feel like it would have been a very meditative in one of those things that like, you know, people who go backpack through Europe, they like the journal of my self discovery. I suppose I'd probably be very meditative and think about a lot of stuff on the way. One thing that we did that most people don't do with this kind of touring is while we rode together when we were mutually supporting, like we carried gear together, we hung out together, we didn't like draft each other or do like cycling best practices. So we both rode this individually. Cause if you ride in a Peloton and you draft, trips like this are even easier and faster. I will say though, I would have struggled more one with the type of bike I have and two, we do ride at very different paces. So I feel like a lot of it was when I would get kind of tired out, you would moderate your pace for me. And I felt that was- But I wouldn't go too slow. We'd still like, all right, here's the minimum pace that we're gonna use to keep- We kind of was like- To get there before sundown. We always have to be visible to each other. I think was the main idea because if we lose the visibility, I mean, we have our cell phones, but I don't want there to be, cause this has happened before in the past when we don't have cell phones. It would be like, oh, I've like run on ahead and suddenly I have lost sight of my person. So, but it really, I just can't recommend this enough. If you have, excuse me, if you have a bike, if you have a little bit of money to stay at Best Western- If you can afford cheap hotels and time off work. Yeah. So it is a privilege just like, any sort of travel is a privilege. And again- Of course we bumped into that German guy- The German guy. He went on like sabbatical, I guess, and on a shoestring budget, just bike camped his way from Seattle all the way across the entire United States. We bumped into him along the way because there was another spot where there was a detour and he was just like, fuck the detour. I'm just gonna go. And we're like, oh, that's ours. So this fellow, one, he had Ortlieb Paniers, but two, it was like he had biked from Seattle. He'd biked across the entire continental United States. And we actually, we got to play the role of the advice giver- Yes, he was on his way to New York. And he was like, where can I camp in New York? And we pointed him at Aviator Field. He said, is there a place to camp by the airport? And we're like, yes, Rockaways. Rockaways has a beach. I don't know what the camping stuff is, but you can totally camp in Aviator Field. People definitely camp in Aviator Field on a regular basis. We have some friends who have spent the night there. So basically, we were able to give New York City advice to this traveler. And it's like, it feels almost kind of old-fashioned in a way. You imagine people back in the day, I mean, they had to do this. We're just doing this for fun. But the idea of this- But like everyone we passed, they would just like whoever initiated contact would shout out their destination, expecting you to tell them your destination. Like, oh, we're on to Montreal. Oh, we're heading to Buffalo. Yeah, and you'd cheer each other on. It's honestly, I just got an incredibly good vibe from specifically the long-distance bike touring community that I ran into on this trip. I just thought everybody was incredibly supportive and warm and welcoming. And they are very different from the like cycling community that you might know and think of who do group rides like on highways. This is a very different community and a very different kind of cycling. That's awesome if that's your jam, absolutely. But I just found this is more about the idea of meeting the people of the road kind of thing. And it is the idea that you have a destination, but the most important thing is the journey getting there and what you see along the way. And like I said, I feel like it gave me a much better appreciation for the just general diversity of experience of my state, you know, from the Bronx to the middle of nowhere. But it's not that there is a contiguous bike path that is almost entirely off roads between Queens and Buffalo. Well, to be honest, it's on one of the oldest roads in the entire state, which is the waterway. It was made in the early 1800s, I want to say. But the problem is there aren't other things like this in America, like even the other segment that if we just got north to Montreal, which would actually been like a shorter ride than what we did, that's not that far. That's almost entirely on highways, like just sharing it with traffic. There really aren't bike routes like this anywhere in America except what we just did. Yeah, I just, it was really good. And I recommend to anybody who's local to the area and even people who aren't local, but like, you know, come from Scotland or Germany or the Netherlands. We plan to next year, not to the whole thing again, but we're definitely going to bike up to that segment past Poughkeepsie, like between that whole area between Poughkeepsie and Albany, like especially like with Hudson in the middle and all, that's an area I would just take a long weekend and cycle up and down any summer. It's good, good trip. Yeah, get rid of bike, stay the, go to whatever town is next past Poughkeepsie and just spend a day biking around on this thing and you'll have a real good time even if you don't bike all the way to Buffalo. And even after a week, your legs will be ripped. Oh yeah, we were so buff. It was like my pants didn't fit after the trip, like no lie, my thighs were too big for my jeans. Not your waist, it's like your literal muscles are just tree trunks by the time you've gone hundreds of miles. And then one of the last coolest things is after a couple of days in Rochester, you're like, we'd go back to work. Yeah. You just got on the Amtrak and took a sleeper car, pretty much the route we biked, we took back on a train in a sleeper car. I could see the Utica sign when we went through Utica, I was like, there's that neon sign. And a bunch of points along the way, we would see like places we stopped. We would see the trail. We would not just that, we could see the canal and we could see the trail at various points along the way. And it was so cool because one, I will recommend Amtrak is a great way to get your bike around, but you gotta be careful to book the proper train. You gotta like super check because every specific numbered train has different bike rules. And even if they allow bikes, they all allow bikes in different ways. Some need reservations, some don't. Some you have to take the whole bike apart and put it in a box. You don't wanna do that. Some you don't. So what we did is we went on the Lakeshore Limited, which is not only is it one of the few trains that has the overnight sleeper cars as it goes to Chicago, but there were also baggage compartment. And so you can, they have a bike rack in there that they literally chain your bike up. They put a baggage tag on it and then you just check it and you come and pick it up, just ride it right off the train. It will not ride it, but you walk it off the train and Penn Station. So we were in this little room at, we got our like Amtrak. Yeah, we were talking about it. I don't do the geek noise all the time, but the- The roommates are great. I love Amtrak, by the way. Amtrak sleeper cars are kind of a hack because most people who use Amtrak don't know they exist. Or if they know they exist, they assume that they're really expensive. And sometimes they are, but if you book early enough in advance, they're like- 100 bucks. Buy two coach tickets and then pay like an extra 100 bucks on top of that. And you get dinner, wine, and a completely private room with two lay down beds in it. So for an eight hour trip because it does take eight hours from Rochester, because- It took us eight days to bike up. So it was about an hour with a train per day. But it was like, it takes eight hours because they switch over in Schenectady, no Albany Red Salir, right? And so we're like, Hey, there's the bike path. And we're pointing down when we were like, go past the Albany place. And the weirdest coda of the whole trip was we get off the bikes in Penn Station at the end of the whole thing. We're back in New York. At Moynihan, we got a fancy new train hall. So if you come to New York, take the Amtrak out of Moynihan. And we're going to head home and then we get off the train. We've got our bikes and we're standing outside Penn Station. And then we just bike home. We're like, why get on the subway? We got our bikes. We've got bikes where like, we don't want to take our bikes on the E train. So we just like, hey, want to do our commute? Yeah, might as well. And so we just after an eight hours of train, we just biked over the Queensborough and then we're home. And that was a, it was so strange. It was such a, such a thing that I've always dreamed about doing but never actually thought was possible. And then was way more possible than I actually imagine. The strangest moment for me was very specifically, right after we got past Albany, like when we made the left turn and we started heading the other way, I suddenly dawned on me that we were past Albany and all we'd done is gotten on our bikes and started pedaling like literally from right across the street of our apartment. Like we walked out of our apartment, got on our bikes and then we were past Albany still on our bikes. Human powered technology. Basically we just did a little like gear and we turned the gear enough with our own physical energy. Some of our friends along the way, like we're like, holy shit, like like dumbstruck that we were biking that far. And our friend Scott, you know, Scott of Geek Nights fame said at best, he's like, people who don't cycle drastically underestimate the brutal efficiency of a bike. And that was a great quote from Scott. I love that. Bikes are so efficient. You don't need to be a super athlete. Like don't think that we're just super fit and we made this work. I mean, we were really ambitious when it came to our mileage. But us being super fit is how we did it in seven-ish days. Most people do a trip like this in two weeks and that's totally expected. If you get to the point where you can bike 30 to 40 miles in a day, like all day with breaks, with eating, with everything, like with taking your time, you could do a trip like this if you can take the time off work. Yeah. I honestly biking might be my absolute favorite sport that I've ever done. And I will say, I recommend it for almost anybody. If you can bike, you should. Yeah. Because it's great.