The Erie Canal Towpath

We do miss the lovely trails around our former home in Northern Ohio.  Our favorite was the canal towpath which ran from Lake Erie in Cleveland to Akron (a distance of about 30 miles)  This continuous strip of land was quite narrow in places and mostly followed the Erie Canal through thankfully flat land beside factories, ruins of old mills, a few much appreciated restaurants, and wonderful, shady woodlands.  When we rode past farmers’ fields, we often saw wildlife; bluebirds, snakes, Canada geese, skunks, and even, once, a herd of 29 deer grazing amid corn stubble.

The path was paved with blacktop in places, and others were smooth, tiny pea gravel—perfect for the narrow tires of most road bikes.

The towpath was very popular and drew crowds of people from a very wide area.  The small town of Peninsula was organized around it, and bikers would rest there to eat lunch or snack on ice cream and browse the antique shops.  They sold small license plate replicas, which people bought and proudly displayed on their bikes to indicate they were supporters and friends of the trail.

Parts of the trail offered rides on horse-drawn barge boats along the canal.  The Park Services Department also demonstrated an old working lock that was once used to lift barges, and they would dress in old-fashioned costumes and also offered tours of a few historic houses.

When we moved to Ashland we hoped to make short trips that would be easy on our old bones, since the hills are mostly on the “outskirts” as we think of them, and there is the start of a good bike trail by 29th Street and another part was proposed by Riverfront Park, but we found connecting the parts via short alleyways, with so many stops for traffic, was daunting.

What has been accomplished with the towpath has been a very long process, and some of it is still ongoing to connect it with many other established trails.  Think how wonderful it would be to bike the equivelent of the Appalachian Trail!  It would be a dream, and perhaps it is only a dream, but I don’t want to wake up yet.

End?…

–TW