Herb Terns and his teen ride the Erie Canal outside Brockport.

Our bikes were packed with camping gear and ready when Sabretooth, the Buffalo Sabres mascot, trotted across Buffalo’s Canalside Park and high-fived us. It was one of many unexpected moments on our Erie Canalway Trail ride.

Me, my wife, Gillian, and our teen, Nikk, recently embarked on a nine-day bike trip across New York from Sabretooth’s Buffalo high-five to our own Schenectady driveway. We would stay in hotels, Airbnbs, and camp in RV parks, state parks, and along the canal. We would search out bakeries and ice cream in new places. We would bike our state at a pace similar to those canal mules that pulled barges in the 1800s.

I might have been brainwashed as a kid by the “I Love New York” advertising campaigns, but with the Adirondacks, Catskills and Finger Lakes, the Empire State would have charmed me without propaganda. I’m familiar with much of our state, but central and western New York are blank spaces on my personal map that........

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