Day 130 (9/23): Camillus to Oneida, NY

Mileage: 50.1; 4,185 total

From Camillus it wasn't too far to Syracuse, where we spent time biking through various old neighborhoods and then visiting the Erie Canal Museum. The museum was in the old Weighlock Building, in which barges would be weighed as they came through the canal. The process was simple: the barge would enter the "weighlock," and then all the water would be drained out, leaving the barge on a scale that would measure its weight. This process took about 15 minutes.

The unusual thing, I think, is that they had previously used a much more efficient, simpler system: the water level in a lock would be marked; the barge would enter (and its weight would displace the amount of water that had an equal weight, as known by Archimedes 2,000 years ago); they would mark the new water level and the change in the water level would then be quickly converted into pounds of water displaced, and hence pounds of weight on the barge. This was a much faster system, because it didn't require draining the lock. But they got rid of it to please the barge pilots, who generally didn't understand how you could calculate weight by measuring the amount of water that had been displaced.

We ate lunch in Syracuse at the original Dinasaur Bar-Be-Que; last December, in New York City, both Steve and I had attended the 25th anniversary celebration of Shorewalkers, held at the Dinasaur Bar-Be-Que at 131st and 12th Avenue.

We had a good ride from Syracuse to Oneida, arriving just as it got dark.