Biking the Catharine Valley Trail

When exploring what to do while we were in Watkins Glen, I discovered that a rail trail was very near the campground where we were staying.  On Wednesday morning, we rode our bikes a couple of blocks into town to the Lafayette Park where we began the Catharine Valley trail.

The trail begins along the streets of Watkins Glen even crossing over Glen Creek which is the creek that goes through the gorge of Watkins Glen State Park where we hiked walked yesterday.

Looking up towards Watkins Glen State Park.

We got on a actual trail behind Watkins Glen High School.

The trail is a good trail of fine gravel.

We rode by acres of marshes...

...and then began riding through the forest.

We could see the Barge Canal which empties into Seneca Lake.

Within a couple of miles, we entered the town of Montour Falls coming in behind an office building.

Once in Montour Falls, the Catharine Valley trail goes along the streets taking us by the Montour Falls Village Clerk's office and the Montour Falls library...

...as well as some old churches like this one.

As we left Montour Falls, the trail began climbing up and up.  Not too steep but enough to make us breathe hard and our knees ache.  Sorry, no pictures here.  I was too busy swatting flies and peddling my bicycle to take any pictures.  We decided to turn around when we had ridden a little over 7 miles.  We had not ridden our bikes for this long of a distance since we were in Florida back in the winter.  We thought it best to take it a little easy and not go too far.

The good thing about all that peddling up the hill was that it was much easier biking back down to Montour Falls.  When we were back in town, we took a short detour over to Shequaga Falls Park.  Unfortunately, it was more of a water drip than a waterfall.

After resting a few moments and getting a drink of water, we got back on our bikes and headed back home along the Catharine Valley Trail.

As we neared the campground, I stopped to take a picture of Seneca Lake...

...and the marina behind the campground where the boats are docked along the Barge Canal.

I think we did pretty well for it being our first bike ride in nearly 5 months.

We decided to go out to eat for lunch after we got back to the motorhome.  The first restaurant I chose to go to called the Weinery (they specialize in hot dogs) wasn't open today.  I liked the name particularly with all the wineries around Seneca Lake.  My next choice was the Blue Ribbon  Diner in Montour Falls.  It had very good reviews and their menu included brick oven pizzas.  When we were about to order, the waitress told us that they were having a problem with their dough and we could not order a pizza.  So, we ordered the special of the day:  broccoli cheese soup with a grilled cheese sandwich for $4.75.  About 5 minutes later, she came back and told us that they ran out of the soup. After getting the menus back a second time, we decided on their chicken ranch wraps.  While we were waiting on our order, we overheard them tell some other customers they were out of cheesecake.  Hmmm.  I was beginning to wonder about all those good reviews.  Unless their food is so good that they run out of everything!  :)  Our chicken ranch wraps were very tasty!

Sometimes not getting what you want makes for a better story!  :)

When I took the visitor brochures back to the campground office, the clerk told me there was a type of "farmer's market" in the park across the street on Wednesday evenings.  We walked over there around 6 and discovered it was mainly food vendors.

The Pi Pizza Truck was there baking their brick oven pizzas from their truck.

Pi was actually a place I had considered going for lunch so we decided to split one of their brick oven pizzas for dinner.

It was very light and tasty -- probably the thinnest crust we had ever had.  Pizza at the lake.  A nice ending to our stay at Watkins Glen.