An Adirondacks Aventure

I had the day off, the clouds were few, I had an important errand to run on the other side of the border, so I decided to play in the Adirondacks.

It was a nice, 475-km ride which can be split into four parts: on the way to, superslab followed by boring, rural two-lane roads; on the way back, boring, rural two-lane roads followed by superslab.

But in between lay the jewel of this ride: for 150 km, NY route 56, 3, 30 and even 458 offered a series of nice corners, generally posted in the 35 to 45 range (mph), taken at 75 (mph!) amidst a scenery that would have been worth looking at had I been riding at the state speed limit of 55 (mph!!) -- like the tourists pulling RVs behind their minivans.

I was at the top of the 416 at 10 a.m., at the bottom and looking at the famed bridge not too long after. The ott.motorcycles newsgroup has a few threads about that mile-long grated bridge and horror stories of riders needing to change their underwear once they got to the States.

I was not like them.

If you take the bridge at 50 to 60 km/h, if you hold the handlebars like you'd hold a pair of doves (enough to keep them from flying away, not too much to kill them), if you let the front wheel find its course, then going across that bridge is a snap.

So was the U.S. border crossing, even if my passport photo looks like the one of a Columbian drug runner... call me Raul!

In Odgensburg NY, I picked up a pair of Sidi Strada Evo Tepor from newenough.com, ditched the very old pair of cowboy boots I had, slipped the new ones in. Damn, they're going to need a lot of breaking in. Italian design, what do you want?

NY 68 brought me 20 miles later in Canton, a small village with a typical American main street that hasn't died yet, an observation probably related to the fact Wal-Mart has not (yet) invaded it. From there, 68 leads to 56 where I stopped a few miles later to take a picture of Brandywine next to the sign announcing my arrival in the Adirondack State Forest.

Just before that, there is a combination of four corners, posted at 20 mph, in South Colton that almost made me turn around to run them again. I should have, in hindsight.

NY 56 leads to NY 3, with more great high speed sweepers and 30 mph curves in series. I grabbed a bite to eat in Tupper Lake, where I could clearly see how high Whiteface Mountain is, 20 miles to the East. Not too long after Tupper Lake, where NY 3 and 30 are duplexed, I hopped on NY 30 North, which follows the western shore of Saranac Lake. Great riding, but I wouldn?t do it on a busy weekend.

Pressed for time, and doing unpublishable speeds on the straights of NY 458, I made my way towards the bridge at Cornwall, going through small towns in an economically challenged area of the state. St. Regis Falls (turn right on County Road 5, leads to NY 95), Dickinson, Moira, Bombay, before hitting NY 37, where the Mohawks are activists, according to the signs they put up next to the highway, calling for an end to taxation, among other demands.

The bridge at Cornwall may not be grated, but its pavement is the worst I have seen in a long time. (By the way, the tarmac in the Adirondacks is of most excellent quality. Sweeeeet.)

From there, it was a matter of following traffic on 138 to the 417, where I was passing traffic like there was no tomorrow.

Lastly, the Canadian customs officer did not ask anything about the boots.