Rome, NY to Brewerton, NY

Day: 9
Travel Time Today: ~ 6.5 hours
NM Today: 31
NM Total: 287
Locks Today: 2
Locks Total: 22

As planned, we called Winter Harbor Marina in Brewerton, NY to make sure they could accommodate us for the night and then went for a quick bike ride to explore a little of Rome, NY.  With Clark's help I could make it across the makeshift fixed dock I talked about in my last blog.  I was astounded when Clark told me that he had already carried both bicycles over to the park at the same time.  What balance he has!

Wouldn't you know that when I stepped up on one of the pilings to climb over to the park grounds, I found the only unstable one!   When I stepped up onto the one that looked the most inviting, i.e. shortest distance from piling to ground, it began to sway back and forth with me on top.  Clark said that he had been using that one as the swaying didn't bother him except when he was carrying the bicycles and wanted something more stable.  Are you kidding me?!

We have special, collapsible bicycles that we purchased specifically to go with our love of boat travel.  I took a couple of pictures of my bike for the blog readers - one with the bike collapsed and one with it expanded. When collapsed, the bike is just over 2 ft by 2 ft square.  We have covers we can put over them and people have no idea what we are carrying.  We have even brought them into restaurants with us and placed them under the table while we ate.   Experts can collapse or setup one of this type of bike in less than 10 seconds.  It takes a little longer for us - but not by much.  The more often the bike is used the easier it becomes to remember the order of the steps required.

"Walkway" Clark crossed carrying our 2 bicycles

Ev's Bicycle Expanded to Riding Size

Ev's Bicycle Collapsed to 2 ft x 2 ft

 Rome is a bigger city than I thought.  We didn't have the time nor the inclination to go into the city proper to explore as we wanted to get underway.  We spent about 30 minutes all told with our bike ride exploration - just enough to get some exercise and see a bit of the local area.

We pushed off from our dock at just after 9:30 this morning heading for Brewerton, NY.  We arrived at Lock 21 around 11:00 but had a long wait as one-by-one 3 more vessels joined us in the lock.   Lock 22 is a short bit downstream from Lock 21 and was open and ready for us when we arrived so at least there we locked through relatively quickly.

Lock 22 is the last lock before Oneida Lake.  We had calm water for crossing the lake; it can get rough on a windy day.  Even at our new slow speed it seemed like we were across in no time even though crossing takes about 2.5 hours.  Clark did the first few minutes at our old cruising speed of 14.5 knots to "clean the turbos" on the engine.  It felt good to be out on open water at our old, near top speed.

Brewerton is on the west side of the lake.  As we entered Brewerton we saw floating docks that had picket fences and lawn chairs.  I don't believe I've ever seen a picket fence on a floating dock in NJ.

Floating Docks with Picket Fences

Another site not seen in my part of New Jersey is boat garages like those shown below.  From one that I saw, not captured on film, it would appear that they use garage door openers just like a car garage and drive their boats right inside for save keeping.

It seemed like everyone arrived at once at the marina.  One boat we met at Waterford pulled in right before us (we locked through Locks 21 and 22 with them).  Another boater couple we met in New Jersey, are also staying here and came over to say hello.  They said they recognized our colorful kayaks!  I just knew those kayaks were good for something.

Weather looks iffy for the next few days, and we have to pick a travel window to cross Lake Ontario.  We're debating how to spend the next few days and where to spend them.  This marina has everything we need including a full stock of boat parts and charges less than $1 per foot of boat, so we might stay here for an additional night if they can accommodate us; otherwise, we might try Fulton, NY where we stayed once before years ago.  There's no sense pushing through to Oswego if we can't cross over to Canada for a few days yet.  We might as well take a more leisurely approach.

Later tonight, after dinner we plan to borrow a courtesy car for a trip to Walmart about 7 miles away! How exciting is that?!  We have a couple of items we'd like to buy including some things for the pantry (oatmeal raisin cookies for Clark's lunch every day).  I'm not a big fan of Walmart, but most likely that store has everything we need.