Last weekend was Cornell’s Fall break, and my friend Fred and I took a cycling trip. It was a delight. Pictures and descriptions follow.
We left Ithaca around 10:30 AM, right after a big rain storm rolled through. We biked the Black Diamond trial to Trumansburg, where we had lunch at Felicia’s.
We then headed straight between the lakes through parts of the Finger Lakes National Forest, where there were scores of dead (and live!) tiny snakes all over the road.
Upon reaching Seneca we took the scenic highway down to Watkins Glen, stopping by Red Newt and Damiani wineries, Finger Lakes Distilling, and the Stonecat cafe.
Right before Watkins Glen, I crashed in the gravel on the roadside while trying to look back at Fred, scraping my hands and losing a reflector on my spokes. We got into town, checked into the hostel, cleaned up my wounds, and had dinner at the wonderful Graft cafe downtown.
We left Watkins Glen at 7:00 AM, just minutes after first light. The morning ride to Hammondsport at the base of Keuka lake was beautiful and suggested that it was going to be a nice day. How naive we were…
We reached Hammondsport a little after 9:00 AM. With our brunch plan (the Village Tavern) opening at 10:00 AM, we killed some time in a lakeside park, and then in a incredibly quaint square park with a gazebo in the center of town.
Coming out of brunch around 11 AM, it was now very overcast and a dense fog had set into the hills. We stopped at Dr. Konstantin Frank winery, and I popped a tube braking too heavily coming down a very long, very steep hill.
With the last light scheduled for 7:00 PM, we decided to skip biking the fork of Keuka in favor of getting to Fox Run vineyards on Seneca, which has wonderful paired wine flights and cheese boards. We also stopped by Wiemer vineyards, where we were lucky enough to be assigned a tasting with their estate manager, who was incredibly fun and accommodating to the point of running out to the vineyards to fetch some botrytized grapes to taste.
We bought a bottle of wine at Wiemer to drink in the hostel, then went back to Watkins Glen. We chose our dinner venue by 1) the likely volume of food and 2) minimizing the wait. We settled on Rooster Fish Brewing Pub.
On the third day we got up later, had breakfast sandwiches at a bakery in Watkins Glen, and biked home by around noon.
