I woke up this morning to very gray skies. I thought for a while that it was going to rain, but it didn't, and the sky finally cleared. For a while it was blue skies with clouds to the north, gray skies to the south, and a mixture just in front of me. It actually turned out to be a beautiful day. I would take a lot more just like today if I had a choice.
I'm finally out of New York! Sometimes I felt like I was crawling across the state, even though I wasn't. I ended the day in Erie, PA. It just wasn't in the cards for me to get all the way across the corner of Pennsylvania and into Ohio today. That would have been a 90-mile day, not what I wanted to do today. I started the day on route 5, but had to cut over to route 20 for a while. In this part of the state, NY 5, US 20, and Interstate 90 all parallel each other. 5 is closest to the lake. At one point I saw signs for construction for the next 18 miles and decided to backtrack to a county road that would take me to route 20. I remembered Jeff telling me about construction on route 5, but I couldn't remember where he said it was. If I'd thought about it this morning I would have started on route 20 because the construction just had to be today. It wasn't a problem though - the two roads were only 1 to 2 miles apart most of the day today.
I stayed on route 20 a little longer than I needed to because I just had to ride through the village of North East, PA. That's a crazy name for a town. Can you imagine answering the question "where do you live?". I live in North East. No, what town? That is the town name! And, to top it all off, the village of North East is in the northwest corner of the state. I did find out that the town and village are in the northeast corner of Erie County. Talk about confusing! Thanks to Scrappy and his grandson John who waved me over to give me some cold water, and who gave me the answer to the question on why North East was named North East.
I passed an old man working outside his house and had to stop and chat when I saw the signs saying that he sold picnic tables and bicycles. He is 80 years old, and has been doing this for the past 16 years. When I started talking to him he thought I wanted to buy a bicycle from him. Oops - I wasn't trying to lead him on, I was just curious. The picnic tables looked OK, but the bikes were pretty suspect. He had a garage and a basement full of old bikes. I asked if he serviced them, and he said no. In fact, he said he didn't know anything about those "speed" bikes. I guess he's not going to put the bike shop in Dunkirk out of business anytime soon.
