Herkimer, Illion, Frankfort, Utica & Marcy

Marcy, Lock 20
43 08.63 N 075 17.53 W

We are at Lock 20, the closest point of approach to John & Cheryl and grandchildren.  Oh boy.  We'll have a good family weekend.

Meanwhile, let me do a little travel dialog about the New York Towns we're passing.

Herkimer: This is a good provisioning stop.  Tie up to the free floating dock, but don't use the parking spot of the pontoon boat used for canal tours.   There is s hardware store, dollar store, super Wal Mart, and numerous restaurants withing easy walking distance.   Right at the dock there is a Thruway visitor's center.  It has a gift stop and a restaurant.  I was amazed to see the parking lot of that restaurant completely filled, no empty spaces, both day and night.  It sure is popular.

Illion: There is a very friendly little marina by the side of the canal in Illion.  We never stayed there but we'd like to.   You can get fuel and stay the night.  Better still, the marina is within easy walking distance of the Remington Arms Factory.   They have a great museum and they give wonderful factory tours.  I took Nick there a few years ago.  It was fascinating.  I recommend it.  (: mention of the museum and factory tours has disappeared from the Remington web site.


Frankfort: You can pull into a side basin and stay there.  I don't think there's much to see in Frankfurt.
I have personal memories though of fumigating huge warehouses chock full of cocoa beans that belonged to Nestle.  That was in the 1960s when I had a summer job as an exterminator.

Nestle had a chocolate factory in Fulton, NY.  Nestle also speculated on cocoa bean futures.  One year, it became attractive to them to accept physical delivery on all those futures contracts.  They hired every warehouse within 100 miles and filled them with beans.  It was the whole world's production of cocoa beans for a year.  They hired us to preemptively fumigate those warehouses to keep moths away.  I also got to fumigate the factory in Fulton every year, again preemptively.  In case you're wondering, yes I did get to eat all the chocolate I could hold, there were tons of it sitting around and nobody around to stop me because I was filling the building with poison gas.  My favorite wasn't chocolate, it was chunks of pure cocoa butter.

Utica: Utica is a fairly big city.  Sadly, there is no place on the canal that is easy walking distance from the city.  There is a $1/foot dock that has no attraction.  There is also a wall you can tie up free where an old abandoned canal intersects the Erie.  From there, Nick and I walked 3 miles to the Utica Club Brewery for one of their famous factory tours.  That was fun.

Marcy: This is a rural location.   There's almost nothing nearby.  However, we have a free dock with electricity and water and 24x7 toilets. Best of all, there's a dance pavilion right beside us.  Every Thursday in the summer there's a free concert.  I've blogged about that in the past.   Tonight we get to hear The Big Band Sound of New York Express.