Day 29: Time keeps moving on...

We are getting close to the end:

Paul noticed this morning how much higher the sun was at 6:30 AM than it had been a day or two ago. There's no mystery --- this is due to our travel in an eastward direction. Its particularly noticeable when we stay for a while in the same time zone. The Eastern timezone is a attractive one, with a western border stretching all the way back to when we crossed Lake Michigan on Day 23. This got me to wondering how many minutes of daylight are we shifting into the morning for each day of travel.

Lets take all the days since Rapid City SD, ignoring the days before then because those routes tended to have a larger North or South component. The distance as the bird flies, if the bird really likes to fly, to Little Falls NY where we are now is 1414 miles. The stage out of Rapid City was day 16, so we've had 14 days of travel, or 101 miles easting per day on average. Each degree of longitude at our latitude is a bit more than 50 miles apart, so lets say we are covering 2 degrees of this latitude line on the world each day.

How many degrees make up an hour on the clock?
360 degrees / 24 hours = 15 degrees per hour (or per timezone if they were even)

So in the six days we've been in the Eastern time zone we've traversed about 12 degrees --- so would expect the sun to be rising 12/15 of an hour earlier, or 48 minutes. The effect will be more pronounced in the next three days as we push farther east while remaining in EDT.

So I suppose you can view each day's ride being like a second hand on a clock, ticking away at the timezones, moving the sun up a little higher every morning. To me this reveals an interesting aspect of our trip: this bicycle mode of travel is slow enough so this kind of time change is subtle, but fast and consistent enough that you notice the cumulative change.

As for the nature of Time itself, its still a mystery to me.

Today I took a small side trip to visit a Russian Orthodox Monastery where we heard some beautiful call & response rituals being performed. A fitting detour for a Sunday

The church had crypts under it for dignataries

This is the ceiling in one of them. That's quite a blessed context for one's repose!

The Finger Lakes are a series of North/South valleys with high ridges between them. Unfortunately we weren't heading in either of those directions so there was a stretch of major rollers: up one hill, over the top and down into the valley just to immediately be confronted with another hill.

Hard to tell, but this is going up about 8 degrees:

They've got a Madison County here too:

And its former courthouse:

Like yesterday, we went by some very classic and classy houses

The small town of Richfield Springs was hosting a classic car show which was just breaking up as we went through. A fully restored Corvette convertible drove by with the best custom license plate I've seen so far: TOOK YRS

Our destination was Little Falls on the Mohawk River. The Mohawk River valley is a wonder of nature, being so much lower than the surrounding land.

Looking over the edge:

The Mohawk River which is part of the Erie Canal system:

 Former Masonic lodge in Little Falls, now 12000 sq ft single family home:

Day 28: Falling back into the good old US of A

Today's ride started with a short jaunt over the Rainbow International Bridge back into US territory.  I was quickly reminded of the parts of upstate New York closer to Albany I've spent some time in. That feeling was present almost as soon as we passed the welcome sign and a dozen Indian Restaurants. I gotta say we live in a beautiful country with beautiful roads. The PACTour route really delivered today with back roads that reminded me a lot of the roads around our home in North Carolina, except flatter. The hot sun and humidity were present also, but I've found a lot of that can be dealt with in your head if you keep repeating "sure, this is bearable" to yourself. 

The overnight transition was striking from Ontario which is definitely midwestern to the Finger Lakes Region which oozes New England. Its really nice to be able to explore in such detail these parts of the country that I haven't been in before.

Sunrise from the Best Western parking lot at the 6:20 AM "prepare your bikes" step.

A typical touristy street in Niagara Falls:


Crossing the Rainbow Bridge, the mist rising from Horseshoe Falls was awesome

Jenny appears to have dressed strategically for getting back into the country:

 Another state line, only Vermont and New Hampshire to go:

There were orchards, but there were fields of stumps too:

Yellow Squash!

Good dirt!

Across from the second rest stop:

Some very big farms and dairies:

I saw some llamas yesterday too but this time I got my camera out in time:

Grand New England architecture:

 Clouds moved in in the afternoon and although our "no rain" streak was broken by a few sprinkles we quickly dried out.

Today I remembered to pack my ice sock, which makes an unsightly back end even more so. The road however was gorgeous:

Day 27: Graceful degradation

Googling the title phrase will get you

Graceful degradation is the ability of a computer, machine, electronic system or network to maintain limited functionality even when a large portion of it has been destroyed or rendered inoperative. The purpose of graceful degradation is to prevent catastrophic failure.

The first inspiration for this phrase was from the road which started today's 137 mile ride. It was an Ontario backroad, and by definition it was in rough shape. Like many of the roads we've jarred along during this tour, the pavement had a seam about every 20 feet that wasn't smooth. I've spoken of these seams in previous posts; they frequently cause a sharp bump to the bike and all the parts of me that are resting on the bike. Lets just say it gets real old. But this road was different. Where the seam approached the right hand side of the road, the pavement was fractured in a fan shape, something like this where dashes indicate broken pavement:

 center                 -----
  line                ---- : -
---||---------------  ::  ::
                        ---- : -
                             ----
So if I rode out toward the right edge, there was some rough pavement but no sharp bump - the road had degraded gracefully.

As the day went on, things were going swimmingly and, referring to how we get from coast to coast, I quoted the hip-hop song This is how we do it to Jenny as we spun along. I thought "Ah shucks, I can't use that blog theme 'cause I'm not degrading." Then we passed the 90 mile mark and I had to reassess things when confronted with the usual after lunch blahs and an unfavorable hot wind as the temperature climbed into 90's.  At the last rest stop I saw Arnie had his tube sock at the ready to fill with ice, but I hadn't thought to pack mine. Still, with Paul's help trading off the lead, we persisted but slowed down bit by bit until the "smell of the barn door" inspired a final burst of energy to make it into Niagrara Falls (on the Canada side).

So that's the kind of graceful degradation you need to use out here to get the day done.

But the big news is that I was able to check off another major lifetime landmark:

I suppose this awesome natural wonder is an extreme example of graceful degradation as the lip of the precipice slowly moves back over the eons.

That water is in a hurry to get to the Atlantic:

The color was amazingly blue.

Lots of crowds, but very different from Mt Rushmore. Here there was an amazing diversity of nationalities and languages, most folks were in multi-generation family groups. People don't really stack up to the river though:

The sun came and went, but when it came we were treated to a rainbow:

As for the ride: we found the eastern side of Ontario to be hillier than the flatlands we rode over yesterday. The day started out with fairly thick ground fog (the pavement here shows the kind of degradation I was yammering on about above):

We had a crummy stretch of road before the lunch break. It was busy, with a narrow shoulder and we were passed by at least 50 dump trucks going our direction and 50 loaded ones going the other way.

We saw lots of soybeans but also some broccoli and tomatoes, some leafy plant growing under shade nets and fields of tobacco. Somebody said they grow chewing tobacco up here.

 A combine harvesting wheat:

A northern oddity: different weight limits from March 1 to May 31, I guess because the thaw must weaken the road foundation.

 More cool churches:

 This one is Ukrainian Catholic