A Little Rain Must Fall

 

We're at Geneva NY in the heart of the Finger Lakes region and will be exploring the area for the next couple of days. The plan for today was to start from Geneva and head west to the top of Canandaigua Lake, head south along its western flank to the Naples at the southern end of the lake and head north to return to Geneva for a total mileage of 68 miles.

Sounds like a plan the night before the ride, however upon waking up and checking the weather forecast, the ride may not go according to the plan. looking at the forecast, it appears that thunderstorms and high winds are heading our direction and due to hit about 1PM.

Being the hopeful intrepid riders that we are, we head out on the appointed route at 8:30AM with hopes that the forecasts are wrong. After all, the skies are blue, winds are calm and we'll keep our eyes on the skies.

We head west out of town along the West North Street, which turns into Castel Road and finally County Road 4. The road is a fairly quiet road broad wide well paved shoulder. We did have to watch out for the fairly fast moving traffic moving traffic zipping past us however.

As we were heading west, at the 8 mile mark we hit road construction and forced us to divert south, west, north before rejoining Count Road 4 again that added about 5 or 6 miles to our ride and we showed up in the town of Canandaigua ready for a coffee break.

A local had highly suggested a nearby cafe called, "Simply Crepes". We also had our eyes on the weather that had darkened as the bright blue skies had been replaced with ominous gray clouds.

We pulled into the cafe and were quickly seated, looking at the menus we ordered several different crepes to share coffee. We made it clear to the waitress, that we were in a hurry because of the impending thunderstorms. We had already decided that after the break, we were going to head back to Geneva to try to beat the weather.

Much to our surprise, our crepes and coffee quickly came out of the kitchen. We should have taken pictures, they all were so pretty, tasty and soon gone.

During the ride back wind had increased mostly from the south, creating strong crosswinds and when we headed south, they became headwinds and north, tailwinds.

All in all, the trip went pretty quickly and we had beaten the storm by just a little bit. The photo above shows the view from our hotel's parking lot as it approached.

Before it hit, we scampered out to a local mexican restaurant for tacos and burritos. As we were eating, the winds increased, the rain came down in buckets, but it passed over in 30 minutes or so.

We headed back to the hotel along rain damp roads to shower up on following the ride.

All of Today's Photos (link)

Keep the rubber side down,

Brian Cox