Erie Canals

Hamburg, NY

There are three Erie Canals.  The earliest one, known as Clinton's Ditch, was built in the early nineteenth century.  It provided cheap transportation of goods and materials for the first time between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes.  It was such a success they built another canal roughly parallel to it, which they call the expanded Erie Canal.  It was straighter, wider, deeper and had fewer locks.  It was finished forty years later, at the time of the Civil War.  Then in the twentieth Century they built yet another wider, straighter and deeper canal which they now call the New York State Barge Canal.  It is still in operation today.

The Canalway Trail extends over three hundred miles from Albany to Buffalo and follows one or the other of the three canals for most of its length.  It is sometimes paved, sometimes a cinder track, and sometimes nonexistent.  I picked up a map of the canal system at one of the locks and found it essential when trying to find my way through cities and towns where the canalway is unmarked, and for the road-rides where the trail isn't finished yet.

Getting off the highway onto dedicated hiker-biker trail was a delight.  After all my complaining about the Long Black Ribbon I realized that the canalway has a lot in common with the highway.  It is long and black.  The big difference is the absence of traffic.  Even the side roads on the canalway didn't bother me.  So I am realizing that it is the close proximity to sixty mile per hour cars and trucks that bothered me the most.  Sharing the road with families out for a Sunday drive or farmers on their way to their fields wasn't a problem, but Eddie Eighteen-Wheeler with his pedal to the metal certainly was.