To Syracuse- Tuesday, August 12, 2025

     After our hotel breakfast, we started off to explore canal towns.  Between Utica and Rome, we stopped briefly at the park at Lock 20.  There weren't any boats going through it yet, but we got to walk along the lock a little bit while the weather was still cool.

    Heading west from Utica, our first stop was Rome.  Scott was making Rome jokes all the way there.  We turned off the GPS and were using our map skills instead.  Scott said it's ok because "All roads lead to Rome."  We didn't want to get any Roman charges when we were there.  And, of course, when we were in Rome, we'd do what the Romans do.  The award for the best joke went to Julie.  She was unimpressed by the town and said it looked like it was built in a day.  We liked the look of Fort Stanwix in the middle of town, but the rest of the town did seem rundown.

    The reason why we started our trip with a stop in Rome is because it's where the digging of the canal was begun.   Ground was officially broken near there on July 4, 1817.   The Erie Canal Village was an open air museum near the site of where the canal ceremonially began.  We knew before we started that the museum had been closed a number of years before and was falling into disrepair.  We stopped there anyway because we knew that the Canalway Trail was also there in the Old Erie Canal State Historic Park.  The trail follows the towpath of the old canal.  Scott walked about a half mile of the trail to the historical marker that commemorated the beginning of the digging.  Julie and Abby drove ahead to meet him.  We should have explored a little further to find the remnants of the old canal, but it didn't seem to be very inviting.

     We continued on, roughly following the canal's path.  The next town on our guide map was Canastota.  We really weren't using the GPS on the phone and we were enjoying not having it.  It bothered Abby though.  "We're lost!" she said more than once.  We tried to explain to her that we weren't really lost, and even if we were it was kind of fun to be out exploring where we didn't know what was coming next.  She wanted to know how far it was to where we were going, and didn't like it when we honestly told her that we didn't know.

    We saw from the signs that Canastota had a small canal museum in it.  We found it by the Canastota Canal Basin.  Unfortunately, it wasn't open until noon, and we had other stops we wanted to continue on to.  We took some pictures and headed on.

    The next stop was the town of Chittenango, which we saw had the Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum.  That sounded promising, so we followed signs to it.   When we found it, we learned that it was not open on Mondays and Tuesdays.  Today is Tuesday, so our luck was not so hot.  It was a little weird at first because the front doors into the building were unlocked.  Abby was a little creeped out by that, and we found it odd too.  We started to look around the grounds and a woman came out and said hello to us.  She explained that the museum wasn't open, but we were able to look around the visitors center if we'd like, which we did.  She told us that Chittenango had one of many of the drydocks that originally existed along canal, where boats could be repaired.  It is the only one that has been recreated.  We saw some paintings and dioramas of what it used to look like.  We also saw an exhibit that showed a circus that used to ply up and down the canal for performances.  Abby and Julie got a free 200th anniversary key chain from her, and she also gave Abby a whistle (which proves that even though she seemed very nice, she must have wanted to get revenge on us in the car.)

    We continued on to Syracuse and eventually stopped at a Burger King for lunch.  Batman was there for some unknown reason.  The guy was committed, we'll give him that.  He kept his cowl and cape on through his whole meal.   There were a couple of other interesting people in there too, but not in a good way.  Julie was happy when we left.

    Our big stop for the day was in Syracuse.  The Erie Canal Museum is a place that Scott has visited twice before.  He was here for a canal song symposium quite a while ago, and visited it again briefly on "Transfer Day" back in 2019, so he knew it was a great museum.  This time the museum was open, though it was hard to find parking and we circled around downtown Syracuse for a while before we finally found a place.  We walked two blocks down Erie Boulevard, which used to be the Erie Canal itself until it was paved over after the Barge Canal was built.  We stopped for pictures at the statue of "Sal" the mule.  Abby wanted to sit on her, but the bronze was so hot in the sun that it certainly would have burned her legs.  We then crossed the street to the Weighlock Building where the museum is.  The building used to sit right on the canal.  It has a garage-like entry that boats would enter.  Then, like a lock, the chamber would empty and lower the boat onto scales, and its fare would be calculated by its weight-- hence the name "Weighlock Building."  We looked through the extensive exhibits on the various aspects of the canal.  Scott particularly liked the china, medallions and other souvenirs from the opening of the canal in 1825.  He also liked the bar upstairs representing the first tavern in Syracuse.  Julie took time to watch the video that was being shown about the history of the canal and the communities it passed through.  Abby enjoyed the interactive videos that let her pass a boat through a lock.  Abby's favorite part, ironically, was probably the replica of the packet boat that they have in the weighlock area itself.  People can walk onto and through the boat to show what life aboard such a vessel might have been like.  Abby stopped in the hands-on kids area of the boat to put on a puppet show for us and color pictures.   We stopped at the gift shop on the way out and Abby got a "Jacob's Ladder" toy while Scott got a CD of canal music.  We also got two free posters about the bicentennial of the canal which Scott will hang in his class, and Abby was given a Junior Ranger pin of the canalway. (She got to skip the workbook that she would usually have to do to earn one.)

    We considered going to the farmer's market in the square (Clinton Square) which we saw as we were looking for a parking spot.  Scott knew that the square was an interesting spot with a lot of cool monuments and sites, but by the time we got to the car, the mid/high 90s temperatures had convinced us that today was not the day to do it.  As it turned out, it was after 2:00 and most of the booths had shut down.  So we decided to push on.  Since Syracuse was our destination for today, we decided to finally pull out the phone and use it to find a hotel and make a reservation.  We ended up in Liverpool, northwest of Syracuse.  We checked in at the hotel and enjoyed the air conditioning in our room for a bit.

    When it was time to look for dinner, Julie found a place called Home Team Pub, which got good reviews for its food.  It turns out the "home team" was the Liverpool Warriors, from the local high school, as well as the Syracuse Orangemen.  (Apparently, the high school is now the Legends, much like Lancaster, because of the recent rules that the state made concerning Native American mascots, but the walls in the pub were still decorated with Warriors murals.  The new name was just approved this last July.)  Scott enjoyed a Syracuse Pale Ale and a Buffalo chicken wrap.  Julie had a Reuben with sweet potato fries but didn't enjoy hers as much.

    Julie was feeling over-tired and needed a Starbucks to pick her up.  After we got her one, we went to what we thought was going to be the Great Northern Mall.  Julie used to go to this mall with her parents when she was going to college in Oswego.  It was a place for them to walk around together, and it didn't occur to her that we would be near it today.  When she saw the sign for it near our hotel, we had to go check it out.  It turns out that the mall is basically abandoned now except for one mattress store.   The mall has apparently been closed since 2022.

    Nearby was a comic book and game store called Larger Than Life.  Scott liked browsing there and he and Abby both got a few things.  We headed back to the hotel.  Scott didn't do any more walking there because there was no fitness center but Abby and Mom went to the pool, of course.