Bicycle Tours

From: Lyons
To: Bridgeport
Mileage: 70

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July 1, and yet another beautiful day. Blue skies, and temperatures in the mid 80s. We left the campground without the Bob and panniers. We decided that since they made little difference to the ride and were full of stuff we would not need. We decided to take a couple of rural routes back to bike route 5. Traveled through the town of Clyde and Port Byron (again two towns that we could spend the morning biking around in). There is a trail that goes from Port Byron to southwest Syracuse, but we stayed on bicycle route 5 instead. Traffic picked up north of Syracuse, but it was still a great ride. We had an excellent pizza and salad lunch. People were probably amazed at the amount of food we packed away. We got to the town of Bridgeport at 2 PM, with a lot of energy in us. We decided to call Verona Beach State Park, but they were booked solid. So we traveled the 2 miles north to Fisher Bay Marina and campground. AGAIN we beat the sag wagon into the campground. While waiting for them, we enjoyed some more weeping willow trees and watched herons; mink, geese, loons, seagulls, and fish do their thing at the lake. After dinner, we found out that Dustin and Dad met with the dean of the BioTech program who was very impressed with what Milford High was doing, and with the knowledge that Dustin had gained. There was a junior who took Dustin on another tour, and found out that the stuff she was during as a junior in college, Dustin had done as a junior in High School. RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) has a program called Bioinfomatics that takes what Dustin is doing now and adds a computer component. Also, for all you Macintosh fans, they are almost all Mac based, and totally wireless. They are currently replacing their G3 towers with G5 towers. They have a graphics art segment that has helped on many of the Disney animated movies (like Shrek).

After dinner, and a dip in the pool we made plans again for the next day. When Mary and I asked Dad to help Dustin look at colleges, we thought they would pick 4 or 5 in NY, and head for home with couple of stops in Vermont and New Hampshire. As it turned out, to all of our great surprise they visited almost all the New York colleges from Buffalo to Albany (along route 90. So we abandoned plan A, for plan B. And they very graciously agreed to see us through to the end of our trek. Plan B now had a 93-mile day from Dewitt (the start of the 36-mile Old Erie Canal State Park trail) to Fort Plain. This would be a good test for the Pan Mass Challenge (our 89-mile ride for the Jimmy Fund on August 2)