We opted for a long trip of 29.5 miles in order to get to Tonawanda, NY on Wednesday, July 2 before a waterfront concert that evening and then the Fourth of July on Friday. We had anticipated that the canal walls would be packed for both the concert and the fireworks. Sure enough the half mile of walls were nearly full when we arrived and boats continued to trickle in after we arrived. We were warned by the Dockmaster that there would be many boats rafting up for both events. Our plan is to be here for a few days, including renting a car to visit Niagara Falls. The scenery along the way included this classic wooden cruiser apparently slowly sinking bow first.
We also passed another classic wooden tour boat that was in much better shape. Many of the little towns have some sort of party/cruise boat. These have often been busy throughout the week with plenty of parties.
We also saw the "usual" large flocks of geese both in the water and catching bugs in the grass along the canal banks.
My vote for the "coolest" building of the day goes to this waterfront (former) warehouse built of native stone. The number of native stone structures continued to increase as we headed west toward the Niagara Escarpment.
We also saw three of these pirate ship playhouses along the canal today. Pretty neat playhouse, but obviously you need a large yard to hold one of these.
We first saw the Niagara Escarpment as we approached Lockport, NY. The caprock for the escarpment is the Lockport Dolomite. Geologic formations are often named for the geographic location of the type section where the rock unit was first described, which in this case was the town of Lockport.
The picture at left shows our first view (to the west) of the escarpment as we approached the town of Lockport. The rocks here dip (or slope) gently toward the west or away from you in the picture, and in this case the escarpment formed the eastern boundary of Lake Erie, and indeed, the Lockport Dolomite is the rock that forms Niagara Falls further to the north. The city of Lockport sits at the top of the escarpment where you can see several buildings and a bridge at street level.
There are two locks that form a flight of locks. In this case, the two locks share one common gate in the middle. These were our only two locks of the day, but they have an impressive total lift of just over 49 feet. The picture at right shows Lucky Us entering the first (lowest) lock. The gate at the far end is the gate that is common to the two locks. The first lock raised us up to the (black) water mark on the far gate. That gate then opened, and we went into the second lock and were raised all of the way up to the top of the common gate.
When we exited the second lock we were still well below the city of Lockport (remember the bridge in the previous photo. That bridge was at street level in the city and we went under that bridge. The canal exits the lock in a steep walled channel (picture at left) that has been cut down into the Lockport Dolomite. This is the last lock on the Erie Canal before we enter Lake Erie. Thus, the water level here is pretty much the same as the water level of Lake Erie. Now you can see how this resistant escarpment forms in essence what is a natural dam for the eastern end of Lake Erie. The Niagara River flows over the Niagara Falls at this same water level, and that mean that the river has cut down through the upper part of the Lockport Dolomite just like this man made channel.
We arrived in Tonawanda, NY about 12:30 pm, and luckily, we had no problem finding a place on the canal with sufficient power available. Typical of these town walls is that some areas have no power, some just a normal 20 amp household plug, and a few have two 30 amp plugs, which is what we need to power all of our "toys", including our two air conditioners. The first warm up band started about 6:00 pm, and as you can see in the picture at the right, the walls were pretty well full, and some boats were rafted up. We were a little concerned about the etiquette of rafting, since we did not want just some random boat to tie up to us and proceed to walk back and forth across our boat all night long... Our fears turned out to be unfounded since all of the rafted boats were tied up to friends.
This was the first of a summer long series of Wednesday night concerts. The actual concert was from about 8-10:00 pm, and by 11:00 pm about half of the boats had left for home so it got pretty quiet. We were both so tired that I am pretty sure that any noise would have gone unnoticed on Lucky Us. The picture at left shows the concert venue and part of the land based crowd. The picture is not very good since we did not walk down to that end of the wall until it was about dark...
I will close with what we could see from Lucky Us of a beautiful sunset.
I can hardly wait for the fireworks on the Fourth of July!
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