Days 97 & 98: Lake Erie State Park, NY

It was planned to be a long ride to get to Lake Erie State Park from where we had stopped on Wednesday, and the weather forecast showed that the weather would be against us the whole way, with increasing wind as the day wore on.  So we opted to split the day in three parts, with me riding the first 24 miles to Sardinia, NY.  That allowed me to ride at a faster than normal pace in the morning, while the winds were lighter.

Alea opted to do the 39 mile stretch to Forestville, NY, where most of the way she had a quartering headwind and rolling hills.  The first dozen miles were dry, but then she briefly rode through some heavy rain before things calmed down to off and on light showers.

I took over for the final 13 miles to Lake Erie State Park, the bulk of it riding directly into a brisk headwind.

Surf's up!  Wind-whipped waves on Lake Erie.

We are camping in Site 50 ($30, power and free showers), in a very open, almost RV-park-like setting.  But it was the only public park within riding distance where we could reserve a spot for Saturday night, so we are happy enough to be here.

We jumped into problem solving mode the night before we headed out.  Every now and then we have some minor communications issues, caused mostly by me getting off route at some point.  We've been pondering how to deal with this issue for quite a while now, and have finally decided to act.  We changed our wi-fi-only Republic Wireless phone plan to a plan with 3G/4G cellular data for an extra $15 per phone.  Now either of us (provided that we are within range of a cell tower with 4G data) can access Life360, an app that we installed on our phones back in March.  It works somewhat like our Spot GPS messaging device - I check in with the app and it finds my location and that of anyone whom I've added to a particular group (in our case, Alea).  So we can know pretty much in real time where we both are, but only if we are both within cell range (it only needs to be 3G data to get location data, but the map display requires 4G data).  That means it will likely be most useful in urban areas where 4G data is available, which tends to be where there are lots of turns and my chances of getting off route increase considerably.

When we started out, our phones and mi-fi were costing us $70 per month plus taxes.  And we often would have to buy another $10-$20 of extra data for the mi-fi, so we were easily spending $80 per month for everything.  Now we are spending $100 per month plus tax.  Republic Wireless will buy back our unused data at the end of the month, and we may be able to keep from going over on our mi-fi data, so the net extra cost may be as little as $10 per month.  It is certainly worth trying it out for a while, to see whether or not if it is sufficient to meet our needs, or if we need to find a better solution.

We stayed put on Saturday, using the time to clean out the van,  clean and adjust the bikes, adjust the brakes on the camper and do some grocery shopping at the local Aldi.  I think most everyone thought we were crazy - spending a long holiday doing chores.