Day 45: Fort Klock Homestead, Little Falls Museum

Today our somewhat-less intrepid, tired, sore but still in good spirits riders rode from Syracuse to Little Falls, NY - 78 miles.

Gil's Cliff Notes:
78 miles. Into Best Western at 1:12 PM. Pretty countryside and rolling terrain with only a few hills on note. A tad warmer today. High point was SAG at 32 miles. There was a pond and some rocks so a contest quickly evolved to see who could make the most skips. My butt gave me some trouble so I had one of our doctors check out the sore spot. Abscess over the sit bone. Got some corn pads. After Dr. consult toured Little Falls, a pretty town on 6000 people. Very nice. A group of us found an ice cream place and had root beer floats. Also found Subway store and had some late lunch.

Okie dokie. As mentioned, Dad's now sporting a corn pad on his tailbone in an attempt to protect the abscess. Fun! Fairly certain it's not infected at this point. It gave him some sharp pains toward the end of today's ride on a couple of occasions, thus leading him to consult another rider who just so happened to be a physician. (I wonder how many butts those touring doctors have checked out so far?) He's hopeful that the corn pad will provide enough cushioning to alleviate the problem - at least he's at the end of the tour, but this week still packs some serious miles. He had to buy another mirror - he'd tossed his "rear view mirror" thinking that he was over "those issues." So he's just hoping he can put up with the redness, swelling, etc and it won't be too bad. Another rider felt that a corn pad may help their own situation as well, and is using one of Dad's corn pads. He's also using "bag balm" (?), which is used on the udders of cows. He thinks it has some medication in it as well, but it helps soften his bike shorts, prevent infections, etc. He's wary of using neosporin on it, since another rider had a bad reaction to it, but he's used it before without incident. He just needs to keep as much pressure as he can "off of this thing," which I'm sure riding 69, 76, then 87 miles this week will really help. The doctor said he should tip the nose of his seat up some to take the pressure off of it, but unfortunately that transfers the pressure to another unfortunate area. As his muscles are pretty well adapted to his current seat configuration, he's wary of messing with that and shifting some of the muscle burden at this point in the ride. After all this butt talk, I leave you on this happy note: he's optimistic that he can finish the tour without too much trouble.

Other than that it was a beautiful day out there. Little Falls is a beautiful town built into the mountain/hillside; reminds him a bit of Harper's Ferry. A very scenic, nice town. During the civil war, they produced union uniforms there, and they used to have a big bike shop put together by cyclists. They also manufactured some well-known brand of bat that was very nice, and Dad and RJ used to have, but neither of us had any hope of spelling it so instead I'm giving you this cryptic sentence because maybe you won't care that much about the details. It was neat to Dad, so let's leave it at that. It has a "long, kind of industrial history." You can buy quite a nice house there for under $100,000, and houses in general for as cheap as $50,000. Current population is 6,000 people, down from 20,000 50 years ago.

From Dad via Mom:
(He had to call her at work after talking to me, because he's been missing her when calling for three days now.)
A gentleman who owns a Laundromat in town met some of the riders at their hotel, and asked if anyone wanted to play some golf. There were no takers, but he noticed 3 of them walking outside and offered to give them a tour of the town. He drove them around town and and outside of town to an overlook over the Mohawk Valley. Great view, great town spirit and pride.

Relatively easy day tomorrow - only 69 miles and not "that much" elevation gain. They get to start an hour late, so probably in a few minutes from when I'm typing this. Should be into the hotel by 2 pm. Then the last two days are rough.