34.0 mi / 9.3 mph / 2551 ft. climbing
Home: Bowman Lake State Park

We didn’t get out of Erin and Uri’s house until 11:30am, because they remained too damn much fun to talk with. Jerks! If there was an online network that said “sign up and we’ll randomly pair you with a cool and interesting couple to share a meal and conversation with in their house”, I think most people would be like “uh, that sounds kind of strange…?” even if they liked the concept in theory. But attach the concept to “bike touring”, and suddenly there is a pretext that breaks down the walls of privacy and makes everyone not just comfortable, but excited to have a non-awkward way to meet new people. I wonder if anyone has taken up bike touring solely for access to the social-connecting of WarmShowers?

New York State Park campgrounds are so dense in this area that we’ll be able to connect them in a chain all the way across the Catskill Mountains. The large gap between Skaneateles and Bowman State Park then was the unusual challenge, so Erin and Uri being able to fill that gap made our lives so much easier than my original thought to stay at a State Forest campsite that probably didn’t even have a toilet. But now we needed to pick up groceries on the way out of town, and Rett was nostalgically excited that the store was still branded as a “P & C”, because that’s what the grocery store in Skaneateles was called before it was rebranded as a Tops (and Rett and her dad still frequently refer to it as “the P&C”).

Fifteen miles in, the skies darkened, and radar showed a cell heading right for us. I could see from Google Maps Satellite View that the town of Cincinnatus ahead had a park with a shelter in it, so we let gravity help us outrun the atmosphere down the 350-foot hill and made a quick jog off-route to the park.

The rain didn’t come as fast as the radar suggested, which made me feel bad for not taking the time to turn right to grab a sweet drink for Rett from the gas station to go with lunch. But eventually it did come, and we were glad to have the shelter. And in fact it was an absolutely perfect bike-touring shelter: there were picnic tables, water, a (clean) porta-potty, and even power outlets! The last one was especially useful for me since the charger that uses my bike’s generator to charge my phone while riding seems to have died like Rett’s did a year ago. The only thing it was missing was heaters, because even though we hadn’t gotten wet, we were both freezing in our shorts and 62F temperatures by the time the rain cleared and we could move on again.

We had to climb 600 feet back out of Cincinnatus’s valley, on roads carefully chosen to avoid the increasing amount of unpaved sections becoming more-prevalent in this region. The town of McDonough felt strange because even though a County and State Highway make up the crossroads at the center, we didn’t see a single car on either road as we passed by the 50-100 houses that make up the town. And over the final six miles to the campground, I think we saw only two.

On the way into McDonough we had a 10% hill to climb, but the silver lining was that it slowed us down enough to let the dark clouds ahead pass by before we caught them. The last hill was than an “easy” one at only 5%, but Rett’s whole shirt was getting unusually soaked on the still not-hot day, maybe because the rainwater steaming off the now-sunny road was creating a 100% humidity microclimate around us?

For the final approach to the park, we had to get on some gravel roads unless we wanted to add a couple miles to the already long day, and Rett chose the former. A quarter mile in on the “CCC Road”, a downed tree made the route completely impassable. Luckily there had been two parallel paths available from the main road turnoff, though unluckily we had chosen the wrong one. The backtrack was still a lot easier than bushwacking our bikes through would have been though (and I was proud when again Rett in her “I ain’t got time for this, we’re so late getting to camp!” mood, took a shortcut across a grass field!)

I wasn’t terribly shocked when the 1.5 miles of gravel shown on RideWithGPS turned out to be the full 3 remaining miles. At least as somewhat of a concession to not being what my app said it should be, the gravel at least got smooth enough for no-hesitation riding as we went (it was pretty rough and rocky to start).

The campground at Bowman Lake was huge, but we also had the place almost entirely to ourselves on this Monday night (like, literally, maybe three other sites on the multiple loops were occupied). And that was good, because it appeared that there were only two shower rooms in the whole place, but at least they were private full-bathroom affairs that Rett and I shared before we even went to our site to set up.

With our late arrival, Rett was upset that she didn’t have the energy to check out any more of the park, so I went off on my own for a quick tour. On the way I found a second shower house, and remembered I’d picked our campsite because I thought it might have been close to that one, but it turned out to not be any easier to get to and outside the camping loops anyway. The ground was extremely marshy everywhere I walked (I guess from heavy recent rains), and the lake wasn’t much to write home about, so I think Rett actually made the right call by hanging out and relaxing at our huge forested enclave anyway.