Trailerboat Cruising On The Erie Canal

For snowbirds like my husband, Jerry, and me, late September is too cold up north at our summer place, about 200 miles north of Toronto near Tobermory, in Ontario, and too hot in Florida. So our solution last year was to trailer our 28-foot Pursuit, Night Heron, to the west end of the Erie Canal for a 10-day fall cruise. We hooked our Chevy Silverado pickup, which we call Big Red, to our triple-axle trailer and started our adventure. We'd done this stretch of the Erie twice on our 52-foot trawler, Monarch, and looked forward to seeing the sights again from a new, smaller-boat perspective.

Opened in 1825, the Erie Canal was the first transportation system between the Atlantic Ocean, via the Hudson River, and the Great Lakes, and it established settlement and commerce patterns in the Northeast and Midwest. Today, barges are few, but it's part of more than 500 miles of interconnected canals, rivers, and lakes that make up the New York Canal System. From May through mid-November each year, the waterway is plied mostly by recreational cruisers on private vessels, tour boats, chartered canal boats, kayaks, and canoes. Even landlubbers enjoy the canal as they cycle, jog, and hike along the 365-mile Erie Canalway Trail, formerly the towpath for mules that pulled the canal's barges.

Crossing into the United States at Buffalo, we started our cruise at Amherst. Although there's a launch ramp nearby, it was almost dusk, so we chose to put in at Amherst Marine Center's travel lift and leave our truck there. Canal cruising here affords a nice opportunity to slow down, literally, with a 10-mph speed limit for the first 124 miles. We weren't in any hurry, and we typically cruise for three to five hours per day, allowing plenty of time for exploring the charming canal-side towns. Once thriving centers of canal commerce, they now open their docks to boaters to encourage tourism and support often-struggling area businesses. Dockage, Wi-Fi, power, and shower facilities are usually free to boaters or come at very reasonable rates.

The weather gods had smiled on us with warmer temperatures than we'd seen all summer, and we pulled into historic Albion's docks for our second night. Here, the old-fashioned Family True Value Hardware store is useful if you need anything and it's just a block from the docks. Farther up Main Street, we found free Wi-Fi at the new library. In the morning, I tried out my new electric hotplate — there's no stove in Night Heron's small galley — to prepare a delicious one-pan bacon, onion, potato, and cheese omelet, with a side of Texas toast. Then Jerry turned his skills to washing dishes in the aft fish-baiting station, rinsing them with the sprayer held overboard without losing a single piece of silverware.

Next up, the village of Spencerport is billed as "someplace special," and it is. Just 12 land miles from Rochester, this quiet country town features free concerts on the canal every Sunday afternoon from June through August. Just bring your blanket or lawn chairs. Nearby, the Book Centre is a huge used bookstore with over 100,000 volumes and a proprietor who knows the exact location of anything you're seeking. At the nearby 1827 Adams Basin Inn, enjoy a B&B with the only intact original tavern room on the canal.

Fairport To Seneca Falls

One of our favorite stops on the Erie was the front-porch-friendly village of Fairport. The straw-stuffed decorations festooning the town in anticipation of its October Scarecrow Fall Festival complemented the bountiful harvest at the Saturday Farmers Market. The tour boat, the Colonial Belle, provides relaxing day cruises on the canal, transiting under the Fairport Lift Bridge. Not only is it an irregular decagon, a ten-sided structure, with the south end higher than the north end, but it's the only bridge in the world built on a bias, crossing the canal at a 32-degree angle. It also just celebrated its 100th birthday. If you've got time, check out the Fairport Historical Museum for canal-development exhibits, and don't miss the Tool Thrift Shop's collection of gently used tools, just steps from the dock at Fairport Village Landing.

The village of Newark, our next stop, offers boaters a beautiful park with wall murals depicting historic canal scenes — plus free laundry facilities at the docks. Visit the clock museum in the library, the Historical Society Museum, or enjoy canalside music on the Erie every Friday evening from late June through August.

From there it was on to Seneca Falls and its twin claims to fame. First, it's considered the birthplace of women's rights in America. The National Park Service operates the Women's Rights National Historical Park at the original site of the 1848 First Women's Rights Convention, and it offers tours of the home of abolitionist and voting-rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. There's also a private National Women's Hall of Fame that showcases great and inspirational women throughout the ages. Seneca Falls' other claim to fame is that it's the likely fictional Bedford Falls in Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life". The town capitalizes on that with a museum of related memorabilia and a festival in December. Finally, check out the free Seneca Museum of Waterways and Industry at the Seneca Falls visitor center, which celebrates the history of the town.

New York's Wineries

Next up for us was New York's Finger Lakes Region, not only a beautiful cruising ground, but also home to a budding microbrewing industry and more than 100 wineries, at least 13 of which are accessible by boat on Seneca and Cayuga lakes. In Seneca Lake, which boasts more wineries than any of the other lakes, we pulled into the dock at Miles Wine Cellers. This is a willow-surrounded Greek-revival mansion with an inn, café, and tasting room. National Geographic Travel calls it the "most serenely gorgeous setting" of any winery in the region. We bought a bottle of Cabernet Franc and one of the signature Ghost wines. The story goes that the ghosts of a young couple who may have died tragically at the site many years ago haunt the winery. The woman's ghost and an image of the house are etched on each bottle of this light white wine.

Just 16 miles east of Miles Wine Cellars, via the Cayuga-Seneca Canal, is Cayuga Lake, where we stopped at Goose Watch Winery and picked up bottles of Cabernet and Traminette. At Cayuga Lake's southern end, we pulled into the dock at Ithaca's Allan H. Treman State Marine Park, New York's largest inland marina with 399 slips.

Ithaca has lots to offer boaters, and the annual Apple Harvest Festival was in full swing as we arrived. This street fair features local artists, live music and entertainment, international foods, local beer and wine tastings, farmers markets, and events for kids. It also coincides with the monthly 20-venue First Friday Gallery Night, making for an action-packed evening.

When you vacation by trailerboat and the weather forecast no longer looks good, you can bring your cruise to a quick end. Once our weather started deteriorating, we retraced our 10-day cruise in just four hours in a rental car, picked up our rig, and returned to Ithaca. The State Marine Park's spacious launch ramps, with long approaches and concrete ramps extending deep into the water, made retrieving Night Heron easy. The accommodating park ranger even allowed us to put our rig overnight in the parking lot so we could get an early morning start on our long drive back to Ontario. We slept aboard on the trailer that night, pulling up our stepladder before tucking into bed. While we missed the gentle lapping of the water on the hull, this was a fitting conclusion to our first trailer-enabled Erie cruise — just one of many trailer trips we hope to take in the future.