33.1 mi / 9.3 mph / 2111 ft. climbing
Home: Erin and Uri’s WarmShowers House

After a month living with Ken in his small house (with just one night away when we went camping), he was beginning to feel the need for some space, suggesting another getaway for us. But then when he learned that we were hitting the road for good sooner than he was expecting, he rallied for the final lap (hey, we had been watching a lot of the Olympics together), and we finished our stay together on a high note, maximizing the time we have left. Again, we’re incredibly grateful to have family that will let us stay with them, where the “free place to sleep” is just a side-benefit. The true value is the time spent together, and not at an air-kiss, “let’s do lunch”, arms-length distance, but truly sharing their lives with us. I think this is probably a fairly rare mode of “visiting” for 40-something adults and 70-something parents (where of course most 40-somethings wouldn’t have weeks to spend away from work anyway), and that makes us feel even luckier.

Shortly before we wheeled away, Erin stopped by on her bike to say hi. Erin? She’s a WarmShowers host in Cortland I had contacted to stay with on her first night, and basically by coincidence, she was doing a day ride up to Skaneateles. Well, and beyond, continuing north halfway to Syracuse, then turning around for an 80+ miles day! Yeah, it’s probably a good thing we didn’t try to join her on the ride back, she would have left us in the dust in the first mile!

There were a few routes we could have taken south to Cortland, but I’d ordered a beer from Homer Hops Brewing at the Glen Haven a couple weeks ago and we now wanted to stop by their brewery, so the route down the west side of Skaneateles Lake would be the most-efficient way to get us there just before dropping into Homer/Cortland.

That made it feel like a more-nostalgic “goodbye” to Skaneateles than the last time we headed out on our bicycles. In 2022 we blasted straight east on unfamiliar roads to the Adirondacks, whereas this time we exited through the heart of the village, past dozens of touchstones we’ve visited many times, most notably two other houses that Rett lived in with her mom in the area.

We did the first quarter of our familiar Skaneateles Lake Loop route, but counterclockwise for the first time in years. And then we branched off NY41 and onto Old Salt Road, something we haven’t done since the first time we did the Loop 10 years ago. It took us up a steep-ass hill, which is probably we we stopped going that way! But it was a gorgeously empty road, and took us high enough (1000 feet above the lakes on the ridge between them) to see the layers of ridges fading into blue haze in the distance.

All afternoon the radar showed some pretty-active cells sweeping from right to left ahead of us. It’s a good thing we’d planned a late start (and had been fueled by a huge Daddy-biscuits breakfast), because if we’d stopped for lunch when we normally do, that would have allowed a cell to crash into us while we ate. Instead, by motoring onward, we got ahead of it and it slid harmlessly behind us. Our tremendous speed did then let us catch a few drops from the back end of the next cell before it could get out of our way, but we never got actually wet. Twenty minutes after we got to the brewery and finally got some of the super-late-lunch/early-dinner into our bellies, some sprinkles came down and I moved our bikes under shelter, but overall modern radar and lucky timing kept us dry on what could have been a very wet day.

After the brewery we had one more hill to top before diving down into Homer, a town whose name was probably seemed more fitting for its elegance prior to the debut of “The Simpsons”. The classic architecture turned to dumpy outskirts incredibly quickly, helped by the Interstate 81 on-ramps that now divide it from the larger and somewhat-rougher Cortland.

Like many Upstate New York towns, real estate in Cortland is literally incomprehensible to a coast-fixated American. Just past the church above, a residential neighborhood of gorgeous old Victorian mansions sits within three blocks of the downtown. One of them, 3600 square feet, 8 bedrooms, and four bathrooms worth of gorgeous 1890s craftsmanship would sell in Seattle or Boston for at least $2 million. Here, it just sold in February for $285k. Pocket change! Like, all you have to do is put up with a little bit of cold for a few months a year. Move to Cortland, people!! The $1.7M in savings will buy you a whole lot of vacations to warmer places!

Emily and Uri are on the first floor of a somewhat-less-extravagant house, so their costs are probably even more-reasonable, as they use Cortland to split commutes to Syracuse and Ithaca. Emily had beat us back with no difficulty and was waiting on their porch to welcome us.

Once we got our warm showers, we talked for far too long with this super-cool couple, which I knew would happen, and at least for us it was totally fine because it was a rare evening when I didn’t have any planning or other work to do (which is actually a big reason why we frequently avoid WarmShowers, because it’s too much fun socializing with awesome people!)