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Finger Lakes 2019-06 Biking: Sunday, June 9

This is posting #7 of a camping and bicycling trip I took with some friends through the Finger Lakes region of upper-state New York. Here's the complete set of postings:
  1. Finger Lakes 2019-06 Biking: Overview and preliminary travel, Sunday, Monday June 2, 3
  2. Finger Lakes 2019-06 Biking: Tuesday, June 4
  3. Finger Lakes 2019-06 Biking: Wednesday, June 5 - small incident, no biking
  4. Finger Lakes 2019-06 Biking: Thursday, June 6
  5. Finger Lakes 2019-06 Biking: Friday, June 7 - campsite transition, no biking
  6. Finger Lakes 2019-06 Biking: Saturday, June 8
  7. Finger Lakes 2019-06 Biking: Sunday, June 9    <- are="" here="" i="" you="">⇐ You are here
  8. Finger Lakes 2019-06 Biking: Trip Wrap-Up
Ingrid and our bikes at a town plaza in Skanaeteles, N.Y., at the northern tip of Skanaeteles Lake.
(Visit the virtual reality rendering to look around.)
We started this ride in Skanaeteles, NY, at the north tip of Skanaeteles Lake, aiming to ride down the length of the lake and from the southern tip to Ithaca. Ash shuttled us to the starting point - the above photo is nearby. (Skanateles Lake is reputed to be the second cleanest large lake in the US. We learned that when a fellow walking his dog stopped and chatted, soon after the above photo was taken. A nice chat, interesting and friendly! He conveyed that the town and area is a great place to be, and I have been increasingly getting that impression.)

We traveled down the west side of the lake - as you can see from the route map, sometimes near the lake, sometimes more inland. Though I tended to expect that going along contours would mean level riding, that's not so. We hit some substantial hills at various points - in part because there weren't immediately-lake-side roads to travel, and in part because the side of the lake (at least the west side, where we were) was often pretty hilly, right up to the lake.

It distinctly did not get less hilly after we passed the southern tip. We tended to be climbing for a long time after the tip, sometimes quite steeply. Our preference to avoid heavily trafficked roads may have contributed, at least to the steepness. Seems like more mainstream roads tend to have more gradual grades - like Route 14 from Thursday - so by that preference we may have let ourselves in for more challenging hills.

We also had to deal with the lack of cell coverage at the southern tip of the lake, and for a good while beyond. This meant no new GPS route suggestions, and because of some rash operations I tried the suggestions I already had fetched were lost.  (I'm still learning to use GMaps well.) So we had to make some more extensive guesses than usual, and probably some of our choices weren't the best. I suspect that we couldn't have avoided some substantial hills to get to Ithaca, though. In any case, it was not bad to have to muddle through without the GPS "omniscient" advice, to learn a bit more.

("Omniscient" in the last sentence is a little sardonic. The GPS is a kind of a critical dependency. Very occasionally, we weren't steered right by. But mostly, it is useful and a great tool. More about that in the wrap-up post...)

In my ongoing food/fueling exploration, I had apples and some grapes in my first break, and then, feeling depleted around 15 miles before our destination I had several dried apricots and dates. I again experienced a significantly more pronounced energy boost after the dried fruit than after the fresh. (Perhaps because it's easier to eat proportionally more sugar and starches with smaller amounts of the dried.) I was still pretty tired at the end of the day, but with nothing even remotely the drained weakness at that point in the first big biking day, before devouring the dried fruit.

I was feeling weary, though. Maybe knowing that it was my last day of biking had some influence, or maybe the extra challenge of the days terrain was more daunting than I realized? I think I felt some cost accumulated across the several days of biking, and a need for more than a day to recuperate. It may well be that I had similar feelings on those bike trips in my youth, but I just didn't have the choice/timing to bail. I would not be surprised. But this is where I wound up on this trip - I think my anticipation to depart on Monday was a good call, and not an accident. I was done, but very happy with what I did!

More about all this in the trip wrap-up section, next.

Next: Finger Lakes 2019-06 Biking: Trip Wrap-Up
Previous: Finger Lakes 2019-06 Biking: Saturday, June 8

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