9.8 mi / 7.4 mph / 1019 ft. climbing
Home: Luke and Andrea’s House

Upon returning from Lake Ontario to “home” in Skaneateles, we spent our last three days filled with an explosion of broccoli from Ken’s garden, along with his special fried chicken. 40 days after we arrived on the Amtrak train, we would depart and continue eastward by the same mode. Except this time, to reach our morning train, we were able to load everything into Ken’s van and have him drive us to Syracuse, rather than pedaling ourselves there.

And then, although the mode was the same, the actual train was not our usual Lake Shore Limited, it was an “Empire Service” train running the same route at a more-optimal time than the once-daily LSL (the Maple Leaf Service also runs the same route, starting in Toronto, for an incredible surplus of trains across New York State!)

The downside is that there is no baggage car on Empire Service Train, so instead of simply handing our bikes up to a baggage attendant from the platform, we need to hang them ourselves from racks inside the passenger carriages. That means we need to get our bikes, and all of our bags, through the narrow train doors before it pulls away. And we need to do it individually, because there is only one bike slot in each car. We’ve done this once before, when we took a Downeaster train from Maine to Massachusetts in 2022, but there we were at the start of the line, on a near-empty train, so it ended up being totally relaxed. Here we would be joining a train already well into its run.

Thankfully the Amfleet I train cars are nearly-level with the platform at Syracuse, so Rett at least didn’t need to wrangle her heavy bike up any stairs. And they opened the door to her car first, so I was able to help for a couple minutes before I needed to run back out and down to the next car to make the 3 trips on-and-off to get bike and bags all on-board. At that point the train was free to go, and the tracking showed that it might have actually recovered a minute from its schedule, so it seems we at least didn’t slow anyone down!

But we had just temporarily stashed our bikes in an open area next to the luggage-turned-bike racks. That’s when I quickly discovered a problem we didn’t have in 2022: our new fat (55mm) tires on their tall (28.5mm, Velocity Aero) rims would not squeeze through the opening between the wall and the end of the hook used to hang the bike face-down. Quick solution: deflate the rear tires. Though even then it required some pressure on the wheel to squeeze it around hook. Hanging the bike by its rear wheel (after its front wheel has already been removed, as required) is an awkward move even in the best of conditions, so Rett would have found it nearly impossible to do on her own. But luckily there wasn’t a huge rush once the train was moving so I was able to finish up my bike and then head over to hers. On my XL bike, I also need to lower the seat as far as it can go to prevent it from sticking out into the aisle. It was a little tough finding two open seats together, so after we managed that, we then needed to re-sort most of our bags between the two cars (we stashed most of them in the spaces alongside our hanging bikes). Finally, 15 minutes after the train left Syracuse, I could sit and feel a bit like Rett frequently feels, motionless, simply waiting for my body to stop sweating. Phew.

Once the train passed Albany, we turned down the Hudson, a new Amtrak section for us (at least in daylight). It paralleled the route we rode into Chappaqua two years ago, but the train tracks hug the riverside in a way that the road cannot.

We got off at the Croton-Harmon station, 2 or 3 stops before NYC. Only a few other people got off there, so there was enough space in the aisles to get our bikes down, reattach the front wheels, and then stand there awkwardly with them until we reached the stop. A couple rounds of running in and out to grab our bags (the conductor made sure the train didn’t leave until we had everything), and another non-bike movement was completed. Certainly the carry-on method with our bikes is a lot more difficult and stressful than the baggage-car method, but if a driven Amtrak employee hadn’t come up with this method to re-purpose the luggage racks, there would be no way to take bikes on a train like this that doesn’t have a baggage car. And “difficult” is better than “impossible”.

Our last ride into Chappaqua was fairly nightmarish, due to the narrow, curvy, hilly roads carrying far more traffic than they ought to. Partly because I learned from that experience, and partly because we were coming from a slightly different direction, our route was much calmer this time, even including a couple miles of nearly-empty, no-centerline road (perhaps the only example of such in all of Westchester County!)

Still, I had failed to mentally and emotionally prepare Rett for the fact that it would nonetheless be a 9-mile ride across hilly, curvy, busy Westchester County, and since her brain had defaulted to thinking the final step from the train station would be a matter of no consequence, she still hated the experience.

But those stresses were quickly soothed when our sister-in-law, Andrea, welcomed us in with glasses of ice-filled water. Magic! Though when I took a shot to the shin from a nun-chuck wielded by my niece in a nerf-gun and hand-weapon battle that soon ensued against her and her brother (Rett was safely in the shower), the extreme sensitivity quickly reminded me that I must have bruised that spot during some of the bike-wrangling on the train.

They all thought that it had been only a year since we last visited, so I was forced to reveal that it had actually been two years! For kids going from 7-and-5 to 9-and-7, I was actually surprised how recognizable they were; that helped make us not feel so bad for having “missed” two whole years, but that surely means that if it’s two years until our next visit, they will be completely different little (or maybe big) people.

Our three nights was a much shorter stay than last time, so it was lucky that it fell on a weekend, which meant that Luke could be with us almost the entire time as well. In addition, we’re grateful that they chose to prioritize time with us, changing their weekend plans from what surely would have been a more-fun event for them than hanging out at home with a couple of weird absent relatives. So the three nights felt like a sufficient dose to tide us over until next time.