To Lockport and Home- Thursday, August 14, 2025

     Scott has been hauling his banjo and mandolin from the car to the hotel room and back again each day without yet having a chance to play them.  In our original plans for this summer, he wanted to record some videos of songs from the deck of our boat as we cruised the canal.  That didn't work.  He brought the instruments along this week hoping that he would find the right place to record a song or two.  So far, we hadn't found that spot.  He thought the bridge at Palmyra might be a candidate and wanted to go back there this morning.  We had our hotel breakfast, got the car packed, drove around for a little bit trying to find a Starbucks for Julie (we finally found one in a Target), and made our way from Farmington back towards Palmyra.  As we passed through Macedon, Julie noticed a bridge and parkside along the road that was part of the Canalway Trail, and suggest it as a possible location.  It was a great spot and Scott ended up recording two songs there- "The E-Ri-E Canal" and "The Ballad of the Erie Canal" which was a parody of a Stephen Foster song.  In the background of both was the Quaker Road Bridge.  It was a gorgeous spot to find and a lovely little start to the morning.

    Once we packed up from the music spot, we followed 31 West again.  It was about 11:00.  As we were passing through Pittsford, just east of Rochester, we crossed a large metal bridge over the canal.  Julie happened to look down and to the right and saw what she thought was a cute little ice cream shop, so we doubled back and it was.  When she and Abby went in though, they found that they only had seven flavors and they weren't ones that Abby would like.   Abby was very disappointed that she wasn't going to get ice cream for lunch, but a little further down the road we found a Tom Wahl's and stopped there.  She got a huge "small" ice cream with sprinkles on it while she shared a kids meal with Mom.

    We made our way through Rochester trying to follow 31 West.  The city traffic and some construction made us lose the route for a bit, but we cheated and turned the GPS back on in order to find our way out of town towards Spencerport.  We ended up not crossing the Genesee River over the bridge that used to be an aquaduct for the canal, but we did cross the Genesee.  We made our way to Spencerport and on to other towns including Brockport, Holley, Albion, Medina, Middleport and Lockport.  Route 31 was taking us parallel to the canal, but generally not within sight of the canal, so that was a little disappointing.  We were hoping to see more of the cute little towns we had been seeing for the past few days, but the countryside this afternoon was kind of bland.  That's probably ok because we were all getting a little tired and were ready to head towards home once we got to Lockport.

    That's the end of the trip for us this week.  Scott plans to go back to Lockport tomorrow on his own.  We had tried visiting the Erie Canal Discovery Center in Lockport earlier in the summer but Abby was freaked out by the movie.  The docent told us that after the movie, the screen was going to rise up and we were going to walk through onto a packet boat.  Abby thought that meant we were going to be trapped "in the movie" and no amount of talking could calm her down.  We decided to leave the museum early that day with plans to go back without Abby before the summer was over.  We have also visited the exhibit down by Canalside in Buffalo in the Longshed called "Waterway of Change."  We went to that on the morning of our anniversary when we were headed towards our boat for our original plans for July.  Scott has already requested Sept. 24 off from school so that he can attend the start of the Seneca Chief's journey from Buffalo to New York City to recreate the trip that was made by Governor DeWitt Clinton to open the canal.