Along The Way

Erie Canal Lock
20 43 08.63 N 075 17.50 W

We're here; the westernmost extent of this season's trip. We'll spend most of the week on family stuff getting ready for Sara's big high school graduation party on Saturday.

Here are some recent sights;

1. Flood damage: the grey painted I beams are replacements.  The old beams were bent like pretzels.  Lock 10.
2. New species?  Libby spotted this lone plant growing out of a crack in a lock wall, 10 feet below the surface when the lock is full.
3. Flood damage: All that crushed stone to the right of Lock 9 shows where the river went around the dam and took out the bridge and road.  It has all been rebuilt.
4. Libby made this pine needle basket on a gourd as a present for Sara.  Sara is very talented artistically, so we're waiting to see what she does to finish it.
5. Tarwathie, a trawler and Pogo Pelli at the city dock in Canajoharie.
6. We encountered a group of Jesuit youths rowing from Buffalo to Albany for charity.

Above: on previous trips up the canal, we never found the time to stop at the Herkimer homestead.   It sits right beside the river and there's a short dock for boats.  This time we stopped to look around.  General Herkimer was the hero of the revolutionary Battle of Oriskany, (the turning point of the war according to a sign on site.)  The mansion and grounds are nice, but the mansion is not open for tourists to see inside.

All of my other flood damage pictures, turned out to be uninteresting and difficult to see the damage at all.  This testtifies to what I said before about the remarkably fast and complete restoration and repair.