Finger Lakes, New York



My fall bike tour last year took me through Rochester, Minnesota.  This year’s commenced in Rochester, New York, a city with a strong bicycle connection, as it is the home town of Susan B. Anthony, an ardent proponent of the bicycle along with being a suffragette.  A mural two blocks from her home, now a museum, features her proclamation that the bicycle did more to emancipate women than anything else. 

She fully recognized its power to give freedom and self-reliance, two of its prime qualities that apply to all and  that have made it my religion.  Every tour I take, whether in Africa or France or the States, is a testament to freedom and self-reliance.  I have traveled all over the world not needing hotels or any other means of transportation other than the flight or train that may have delivered me to my starting point. 

I am always happy for the opportunity to travel by Amtrak, especially when it’s on a line that doesn’t require one to box their bike and just lets cyclists hand it up to the baggage car after having stripped it of its panniers.  I was given priority treatment at Chicago’s Union Station, allowed to be the first to board the 9:30 p.m. train to New York, wheeling my bike to the head of the line led by an attentive attendant.  I took a seat in the back of the car in front of a space where I hoped to put down my sleeping bag, but unfortunately it filled with luggage, so I didn’t have the best of sleep, sharing a seat with a hefty young guy who couldn’t pronounce the name of the city he was going to.  He had to spell it out when the conductor asked him his destination.  “S-c-h…”.

“Oh, Schenectady,” the conductor said.  “It took me several trips before I could pronounce it too.  I used the trick of ‘connect-with-me’ to remember how to say it.”

An older lady sitting in front of us was upset there wouldn’t be a smoke stop all night, and, in fact,  not until Schenectady, an hour-and-a-half after Rochester.  “That’s an outrage,” she said.  “I’m the widow of a Vietnam vet and I need to smoke.  Sorry. I’m from Brooklyn and I have a bit of an attitude.”

The conductor explained there’s usually a smoke stop in Buffalo, but the platform was under construction and the train had to make three short stops there for the coach and the sleeping and baggage cars, none long enough for smokers to fulfill their habit.

I was as disappointed as the smoker that the Anthony museum in Rochester didn’t have her bike, unlike the Women’s Christian Temperance Union museum in Evanston that honors Francis Willard, another suffragette and cyclist who wrote a book in 1895 titled “How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle.”  Her bicycle from the 1890s is on prominent display.  She was born in a small town outside of Rochester in 1839, nineteen years after Anthony,  before moving to Evanston in 1858 with her family.



The Anthony Museum, a mile from the train station, didn’t open until eleven.  My overnight train arrived at ten, so I dropped by the library first.  It wasn’t a Carnegie, though It was inspired by his largess, funded by a local industrialist in 1911.  It was a huge hulk of a building thanks to a $400,000 grant, but lacked the grace and majesty of a Carnegie.  An addition was built across the street seventy years later funded by Bausch and Lombe, one of three prominent companies that got their starts in Rochester along with Kodak and Xerox.  Among the inspiring phrases chiseled into the facade of the new concrete and glassy library was “Failure is Impossible,” one of Anthony’s famous sayings.

It came in one of her later speeches before her death in 1906, fourteen years before women gained the right to vote in the US.  She did vote once in 1872 when she and fourteen other women forced the issue claiming the recently passed 14th Amendment gave them the right.  The Supreme Court later ruled against her interpretation.  Utah had actually given women the right to vote, but had to rescind the right to become a state.



I also stopped by the sprawling George Eastman museum in the film pioneer’s mansion.  It contains one of the largest collection of photographs in the world along with an archive of 28,000 films. One is immediately greeted in the parking by a stunning replica of an eighteen-by-sixty foot photograph of llamas grazing at Machu Picchu that had once graced New York’s Grand Central Station.  It was one of 574 such photographs in a series entitled Colorama that ran from 1950 to 1990 with a different one mounted every four weeks by Kodak promoting color photography and travel.

Adjoining the museum is a movie theater that has a continual retrospective showing a different film five times a week, Tuesdays through Saturdays.  “Wanda” from 1970 had played the night before.  The Film Center in Chicago just included it in a series of “One and Dones” of great films that were the sole work of a director.

The first Carnegie of these travels was fifty-miles southeast in Penn Yan, nestled among the Finger Lakes.  Traffic was heavier than I would have liked it, only thinning out the final ten miles when agriculture began to take over from all the residences and businesses.    New York is one of six states with more than one hundred Carnegie Libraries, but sixty-six of them are branch libraries in the Five Boroughs.  There were only forty-four constructed outside of the city.  Four have been razed.  

I visited thirteen in June of 2016, most with Chris, who joined me for a spell on his ride somewhat tracing the circumference of the US during Covid.  I’m not sure if I’ll get to all twenty-seven of the others scattered around the state on this trip, as I’m sticking to the northern portion of the state before heading over to New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine and Nova Scotia.  I could finish off the state afterwards unless I stick to the Atlantic seaboard and seek warmer temperatures.



The Penn Yan Carnegie has a large addition greatly dwarfing the original modest two-columned library, whose entrance is no longer used and largely overlooked.  A plaque inside honored the town’s first librarian, who assumed the position in 1895 before the Carnegie.  The town took its name from its earliest settlers who were largely from Pennsylvania and Yankees from New England.  The library required a password for its WI-FI.  It was “vineyard” as there are quite a few in the region.  The road along Canastota Lake, one of the eleven long  narrow finger-like lakes of the region,  was called the “Seneca Wine Trail.”  I first read it as "Scenic Wine Trail,” which I took as a bit of an exaggeration, as the homes and vineyards along the lake weren’t particularly scenic.  I was hoping for forests.  I had to make do with a forest a couple miles before the lake for my first campsite.