Erie Canal Ride, Day 5, Quiz 5

For the full answer to yesterday's quiz check out Tipperary Hill and hope the colorblind never go there.

Syracuse to Rome. While it sounds like we're riding through Italy, we are still plugging along the bikeways and roads of upstate New York. Of course the town names do beg the question of why all the towns were named after Greek and Roman cities but that is something to continually ponder while also contemplating how to pronounce other names like Canajoharie or Onondaga. We stopped at the Canastota Canal Town Museum and the Erie Canal Village where we rode a canal boat towed by two horses. It was hard to believe that those two horses alone could pull boat, and we tried to get the captain to confess the presence of a hidden electric motor, but apparently, two horses can pull a big canal boat.

Unfortunately the canal boat did not go all the way to our tent city destination. It was a pretty hot day and it being the 5th day of riding we were feeling a bit ummm slow. And that's were we come to today's quiz question.

How do you get from one place to another on a bicycle in the fastest time but expend the least amount of energy? (hint - there were three of us, much like the top GC contenders in the tour).

Speaking of the tour. It was at this point in the ride that S. began discouraging anyone from mentioning The Tour de France to me. [begin rant] Last year on our ride I tried desperately to get Tour results but no one knew them, heck no one even knew The Tour was on and in the end had to actually call home. This year people talked about The Tour and even posted the top GC on the bulletin board every night. Why? Because of Lance. No Lance, no one cares about the The Tour - so are they really fans or just fair american fans. I even suspect that as it became clear that Lance was not moving up into first people became even less interested and for that matter....I will stop now.

We spent the night at Fort Stanwick. Great museum, great fort. I'd just finished reading The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution which focuses on Iroquois Six Nations of New York and Upper Canada during the era of the American Revolution, and it was good to see Oneida Carrying Place in person and get a sense of the area before the Canal. It was however, a hard place to find a level camping spot.