I'm spending the day in my hotel room, and with my new friends here in Herkimer. I'm also planning on tuning up my bike a bit, and working a bit on this blog.

In the meantime, thanks to all of you who pointed out my typos and other issues with the site. I'm new to HTML (as you can probably see by the 90's vibe of this site), and usually I type up the post late at night, after everything else is sorted out. When I'm in a tent, that means setting up, getting the gear inside, eating something, and unpacking my technology bag to dig out all of my chords for charging and transferring files from devices to my computer. When I'm at a hotel, that means taking a long shower.

Today I biked around Herkimer and Herkimer County Community College, for a whopping total of around 3km. I brought no gear with me. Here is a map of my travels today:

As you can see, I wandered around the downtown a bit, visiting Papaleo's pizzeria, where I tightened my gears, and realigned my back gears in preparation for the mountains of the next few days (My lowest gear wasn't working since yesterday, so I really wanted to fix it):

Afterwards I biked up a really big hill (about 80m vertical) to the campus of Herkimer County Community College. I'm a bit embarrassed complaining about how hard it was, since I want to save my complaints to the stretch from Albany to Springfield, but let me just say that I climbed a big hill today, and I was tired by the end of it.

Still, the view from the top was amazing!

The view was also quite scary, as I kept having that voice in the back of my head reminding me that I'm soon going to have to climb up all of these land-waves.

Herkimer is an historic place . It was settled like way before I was born, as evidenced by this gravestone from 1777:

Here is the view down Main Street:

They even had a jail:

On my way back to my motel, I also passed by the city hall:

Overall, it's a really beautiful town.

After a pizza lunch, I went back to my hotel room with grandiose plans of editing older blog posts, making a nice homepage for the blog, and generally making the links more user-friendly. Instead, I fell asleep and napped until around 9:00pm, by which point it was time to post again.

I might get around to fixing up the site after crossing the mountains, as I expect I'll have another rest day later on.