Saturday, the 14th of August greeted us with a sunny sky and pleasant temperatures. After the rain of the past two weeks, it felt like paradise. T
he engineering that went into the locks of the Erie Canal amazed me. In Lockport, for example, the Flight of Five Locks carried the water over the Niagara Escarpment, a drop of sixty feet in about two city blocks. Originally built in 1824, the locks have been restored and now carry traffic up and down the cliffs that, not far away, run under Niagara Falls. Continue reading
Breaking Out 2021: the Erie Canal Trail and New York City
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Saturday the 22nd of July, I saddled up and rode to the main train station in Boulogne-sur-Mer. I had not planned to run alongside the Somme, but the tracks followed the swollen river all the way to Amiens. I needed to get off at Saint Roch to change for Rouen, but, mesmerized by the scenery, I almost missed my stop. 
(I never saw the 1979 movie, but the title stuck with me.) On Wednesday, the 12th of July, Marianne and her husband Hans had invited me to dinner. I spent the morning waiting for the rain to stop. After lunch in my room, I rode to the Mauritshuis palace, officially the “Royal Picture Gallery”. I planned to visit it, the Escher Museum and take pictures of the Binnenhof (Parliament) and maybe another museum. The plans fell apart quickly. 
Under an overcast sky on the 4th of July, I rode to the Hauptbanhof in Köln (Cologne) and caught a Regional Express to Düsseldorf. Before checking in, I rode to the river, where I wanted to see the modern architecture on the waterfront. 
Thursday morning the 29th, my host Nasr went to his German class. I did my laundry, then walked east along the Mosel River to the Deutsches Eck (“German Corner”), the point of land formed by the confluence of the Mosel and the Rhine. There, I caught a cable car to the imposing Festung Ehrenbreitstein that overlooks the east bank of the Rhine River. 
The Freewheeling Freelancer 