16 Miles on the Erie Canal

We arrived in NY this morning at 6:45 a.m. I didn't really get to sleep on the plane because we left about 10:30, far too early for me to fall asleep, and when I finally did, around midnight (Sacramento time) I only slept for an hour before the man by the window wanted to get up and go to the bathroom, and then I had to stay awake to wait for him to come back. They were a very nice couple, but I really only got about an hour of sleep. Then when we arrived, we decided to go to Lockport (a really charming town near Buffalo, and maybe take a boat trip on the Erie canal. It was a good idea, but I was pretty tired to be driving in unfamiliar places. The hope was that we could just relax on the boat trip, but we didn't count on the travel part being rather complicated. Anyway, we went out there, walked around and then took a ride on a boat. It was very nice.

Here it is. The Erie Canal, famed in song and story, an important part of history and a miraculous engineering feat. President Jackson refused to get the federal government to pay for the canal, because he said it would bankrupt the nation, but New York went ahead and built it themselves. When the railroads came in, they built bridges across the canal everyplace they could, and they built them as low as they possibly could to obstruct the travel on the canal. This bridge was once 30 feet lower than it is now.

These pictures are in reverse order, but they're all taken from the same place on the boat as the boat is rising in the lock. The yellow sign is at the top of the lock. Takes about ten minutes, and there are two locks together that each raise the boats about 30 feet or so. It goes very fast.
The boat trip was interesting after having learned about the Erie Canal in 6th grade and then actually seeing it. Of course it's been more than 50 years ago. There were classes of kids here seeing it while they were learning about it.


The Captain of our boat, toward the end of the ride, showed us two steeples. One was the Catholic church, important because it was the tallest spire in NY at the time or something, and about the lone Irishman who climbed up and installed the cross on top, after which he "danced a jig on top of the cross." Later he was killed in a car accident. I couldn't tell if this was just ironic, or if he was being punished for dancing a jig on top of the cross. More interesting to me, was the church across the street, the Presbyterian which has eight Tiffany windows. There is a very large one (two windows together) of Jesus and the disciples, then there are 7 around the sanctuary, plus 9 more that are meant to look like Tiffany windows. The differences are subtle, and I don't think I'd have grasped them without the handy-dandy earphones they give you to explain about them. They are all wonderful. I can't believe I never realized how much Tiffany was beholden to the pre-Raphaelites. But once it was mentioned, I can see it. They allowed you to take pictures in there, but I didn't realize the battery in my camera was dying until it was dead, so I didn't take any. This picture was taken from the web. It is the best one in some ways, because it really looks as if the lantern is lit, and the light showing on the other areas of the picture is so painterly.

Driving back from Lockport was more of a challenge than we expected, mostly because we didn't have a map that actually had Lockwood and Buffalo on it, though I could figure out where the match was, but John insisted on continuing to use a tiny map where the area in question was about an inch square as opposed to the map I had where the area in question was about a 12-inch square.

Dinner tonight was at a wonderful Greek restaurant near our hotel. I was so happy not to fall asleep in my food that I ate almost everything on my plate, which included a half a chicken, two giant potatoes, a salad with a pound of cheese on it and surprisingly a side of cole slaw.