Which Finger Lake should you bike around?

Last week, a woman with the local Nurse-Family Partnership named Holly Beaston came downtown to the newspaper so I could give her a check for my final fundraising amount. After the GoFundMe fees, it came to about $2,975, so I topped it off to $3,000, which was my goal to start with. Witness:

So, that's that. All finished. Thank you to everyone who helped me.

I'll just do one last thing here before I sign off for good. A lot of people have said to me this summer that they'd like to ride around at least one Finger Lake themselves. They ask me which they should do. Now that I've got some first-hand knowledge, I thought I'd describe each of them briefly here, in case you want to go out for a ride before the weather turns.

Here are my 10 rides, subjectively ranked from easiest to hardest. (There are 11 lakes, but I did Canadice and Hemlock together.)

By the way, you can go to mapmyride.com/routes and search any of the lake names, and you'll get some detail on the mileage and climbing for each of them, as well as directions. That's what I did. You can do the same sort of thing with Google topographical maps. Just search "Seneca Lake topographical map," for example, and it comes right up. Click the cycling icon as your mode of transportation and it gives you the hilliness details.

My rankings, from easiest to hardest:

10) Honeoye Lake - 18 miles, 279 feet in elevation gain. This one was really quite pleasant. At a very leisurely pace, it took us about 90 minutes to finish. No real climbing at all. A great ride to get your feet wet.

9) Conesus Lake - 19 miles, 407 feet in elevation gain. Conesus is maybe a little more up-and-down than Honeoye, but pretty much the same thing. Less than two hours for certain, no real hills. Hugs the lake a little more closely than Honeoye.

8) Owasco Lake - 31 miles, 1,206 feet in elevation gain. If you're a more or less regular cyclist with a bicycle in fair shape, Owasco will be a fun ride for you. The hills are gradual and traffic is minimal. Nice views of the water.

7) Otisco Lake - 17 miles, 726 feet in elevation gain. By the numbers, Otisco is no harder than Honeoye or Conesus, and in fact it's easy enough for about 16.5 miles. It felt much harder, though, because of a short but very steep incline on Moon Hill Road. It was the only spot that really defeated me the entire summer. That being said - you could easily dismount and walk up in 15 minutes, and be on your way again.

6) Skaneateles Lake - 40 miles, 1,864 feet in elevation gain. I would say those first four lakes make up one category among the 10 rides. They're a perfectly fine starting point for a recreational cyclist. Skaneateles, Keuka and Canandaigua are a step up. The riding on Skaneateles isn't a lot more rigorous, but there's some extra distance. There were one or two longish, moderate climbs, but still nothing too bad. A very beautiful stretch of riding on the south/southwest end of the lake.

5) Keuka Lake - 59 miles, 2,149 feet in elevation gain. As I mentioned in my write-up, this was my favorite ride. The views were great and you mostly avoid heavy traffic. There are three towns along the way, so it's easy to break the ride up. The distance is the only real challenge, but if 59 miles seems long, you can shortcut across the bluff (the land between the prongs of the Y) and shorten it by 15 miles or so.

4) Canandaigua Lake - 42 miles, 1,334 feet in elevation gain. This is a ride you can really customize to your own liking. On the west side, there are a number of options for where you ascend from the shore to the ridge. We took probably the easiest one, but there are a number of others. Bopple Hill Road is semi-legendary as the steepest ride in the region; I could only marvel at it from the car. Canandaigua is probably the worst ride in terms of having to share the road with cars and trucks.

3) Cayuga Lake - 93 miles, 2,180 feet in elevation gain. This one requires some explanation. I'm ranking them the way I did them. In this case, that means riding from just south of Seneca Falls around to just northwest of Ithaca in one day, then finishing on the second day. That's about 60 and 35 miles on the two days. The first day has some pretty challenging climbs; the second day is quite pleasant. I should note that if we were considering this as a one-day ride like the others, it would be the hardest.

2) Seneca Lake - 79 miles, 1,767 feet in elevation gain.  This is a pretty uncomplicated ride. It's just very frickin' long. Not too hilly. Nice to see all the wineries. Very long.

1) Canadice and Hemlock lakes - 43 miles, 3,010 feet in elevation gain. This was my first ride; it feels like a long time ago. The distance isn't too bad, and in fact it only took us maybe four hours to finish, as I recall. But you'll note that the figure-eight around Canadice and Hemlock has about 50 percent more elevation gain than Cayuga in less than half the distance. That means a lot of climbing, including one very big push in the last few miles. This and Seneca Lake were the two rides where I truly felt out of gas at the end.

I hope everyone who enjoys riding their bike will consider tackling one or two of these, as it suits your ability and equipment. And thanks for following my blog posts!

Cayuga Lake - mission accomplished

***Please visit my fundraising page here***

The best part of this project - besides all the money for a good cause - has been getting to spend most of a Saturday or Sunday with a lot of friends and family I don't see as often as I'd like to. I haven't had a good long talk with my high school friend Buddy Nyhof or my cousin Matt Gracie for ages. John Forbush and David Riley gave me some parenting tips. My sister Laura rode up and down Skaneateles Lake in the rain without a complaint.

I guess it's pretty standard adult behavior to fall away from spending time with people you care about, and to regret it. But the most shameful example for me is that even though I live within walking distance of two of my best and oldest friends, Mark Wyand and John Fornof, I sometimes go a month or two without seeing them. It's stupid.

So, for the final and longest lake of my summer, I got the two of them to ride along with me, and to split it into two days with a night camping at Taughannock Falls State Park in between. That was this weekend. We went 93 miles around Cayuga Lake; when we finished Sunday morning, it meant the end of my little adventure.

The first day was long and hot. We broke it up with a dip in the water near Ithaca, then a great meal at the Ithaca Beer Co. brewhouse. Mark's girlfriend Zeynep came up huge, bringing our camping gear up to the site in the evening then coming in the morning with bagels and to take our heavy stuff back again.

The second day was short and rainy. I meant to jump in the lake at the end of the ride - I was soaked through anyway, and it would have been a fun video for the blog, after I bailed on my original promise to post videos of every ride. But the water up at that end was not very appealing, and we decided instead to go for breakfast at a diner in Waterloo. It was the smarter choice.

So, that's it. I finished all the lakes and I raised my $3,000 (though I'd be grateful for late donations). I'll have two wrap-up posts in the next week or two, then stop cluttering your Facebook feeds for a while.

Keuka Lake

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I'm getting toward the end of my summer adventure; on Saturday I finished my 10th lake out of 11, going 59 miles around Keuka Lake.

This was the trip I had to cancel back in June due to a family health emergency that, thankfully, turned OK. My friend John Forbush and I rescheduled for this weekend and set out from his house with the sun just barely up.

John became a dad a year or so ago, so we had plenty to talk about on the drive out to Branchport and as we began our ride. There was supposed to be heavy rain, but again I got lucky - we didn't see a drop of it.

I wonder - if there were a survey of western and central New Yorkers of their favorite Finger Lake, which would come out on top? I would guess it would be among Keuka, Skaneateles and Canandaigua, and I have a feeling Keuka would be first, for a few reasons.

It's big enough that a lot of people are familiar with it, and it has vacation cottages and permanent residences spread along a good portion of the shoreline (unlike Skaneateles or Honeoye, for instance, where they're mostly clustered at the north end). And of course, its unique Y shape means there are many more views of the water from angles you don't get elsewhere.

Put all that together with fine weather, moderate hilliness and good company, and I'd say this was my most enjoyable ride of the summer. It was long enough to be challenging but not as grueling as 80-mile Seneca Lake. The main road on the east side had a lot of truck traffic, but it is paralleled most of the way with sheltered roads for cottages that were perfect for quiet riding.

It's hard to believe I only have one more ride, but it's a big one. Cayuga Lake is the largest lake by circumference, between 90 or 100 miles depending on the route you take. I'll be tackling it in two days next weekend with two of my oldest friends.

Please click here to donate to my fundraiser.

Hitting my fundraising goal

When I created my GoFundMe page, I wasn't sure what to set for my goal. I've never done this sort of thing before, and my friends and family seem to occupy the usual spectrum between stingy and generous. I set it at $3,000, or a little less than $300 per lake.

For a while there, it didn't seem like I was going to make it - and I was OK with that. Since the number was arbitrary in the first place, I was just happy to be contributing something, even if it was only $1,000. That still goes a long way for a young woman and baby in need.

If you look at the page now, I'm at $2,501 (thanks to Ben Jacob for the only donation not in a $5 increment). But in fact, today I went over my $3,000 goal, thanks to my job.

We have quarterly awards for various things at the Democrat and Chronicle. One of the categories is called "Making Rochester Great." It goes to people who do a lot of community service and what not.

The important thing is that it comes with a $500 donation from the D&C to a charity of the person's choice. So today, I was very proud to win the award - for the second time now - and direct the $500 to Nurse-Family Partnership, putting me at $3,001. I'm not sure if the company will agree to send it to my GoFundMe or just cut a check directly to the organization, so it may not show up, but the money is there.

I'm not terribly comfortable writing a post about winning an award, but I'm doing it for two reasons. 

First, while the award was for things I've done mostly off the clock, the most important aspect of my job is being in a position to improve my community, and to shine a light on others who do so. In the last few months, that has included writing about a program that gets city kids out into the woods; a profile of a Honduran refugee who managed to graduate high school in three years despite arriving here with no English at age 16; and an investigation into mistreatment of some of the most vulnerable students in Rochester, those with disabilities. If I couldn't write about that sort of thing, I wouldn't much like being a journalist.

Second, I really appreciate working for a company that places value in the right things. The newspaper/online media/whatever industry is a turbulent place right now - maybe you saw John Oliver talking about it a few days ago - but we're still doing important work, and the D&C and other papers like it are still informing and inspiring people in every city in the country. The D&C doesn't have as much cash lying around as it used to, but it still puts aside thousands of dollars a year to support important causes like this one.

So, thanks to my bosses for the generous donation, and to everyone else who helped me get to my goal. And if you have any extra cash left and you don't yet subscribe to your local newspaper, give it a thought.

Canandaigua Lake

Thanks for reading, and please donate to Nurse-Family Partnership!

Smart cyclist that I am, I backloaded my summer of biking with a few of the more difficult lakes; Canandaigua is one of them. If you've ever been to Bristol Harbour - or Bristol Mountain, for that matter - you know the west side of Canandaigua Lake has some hills.

I went out there this Saturday with my cousin, Matt Gracie, who left his house in Buffalo well before the sun came up to meet me in the Wegmans parking lot at 7:30 a.m. Matt is not only the tallest rider of the summer - he's got me by two inches - but one of the most experienced cyclists. He does plenty of road and mountain bike riding and has commuted across the Canadian border on two wheels. I didn't even know that was a thing.

As with nearly every ride, we had impeccable weather. It was pleasantly cool to start the morning with no clouds at all. We went counter-clockwise, starting with the worst climbing of the day on Seneca Point Road. That got a little sweaty, but for the next few hours it was smooth riding. We also got a nice surprise at the end of our 42 miles, as my (our) Aunt Michelle and my mom treated us to a lunch of very good Mexican food at Rio Tomatlan in downtown Canandaigua.

I'd also like to thank Matt for his generous donation to my GoFundMe. I set my goal at $3,000 somewhat arbitrarily when I began, but now we're just a few hundred dollars away from meeting it. If you haven't donated yet and you've got a few dollars to spare, it would go to a great cause.

This Saturday I go to Keuka Lake with my good friend John Forbush. This is the lake that got derailed earlier this summer, you may remember, when my father had emergency heart surgery. He's doing great, so there won't be any excuses this time.

Otisco Lake

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In all the excitement over the baby news, I accidentally let a week and a half go by without writing up my ride around Otisco Lake.

If it was going to happen to any lake, I could have told you it would be Otisco. It's a pretty under-the-radar body of water. It's the easternmost Finger Lake and one of the smallest, just 18 miles around. Even in Syracuse, people are more likely to go to Skaneateles than Otisco. And the largest town there is Marietta, which is, well, not a large town.

Otisco is also the only Finger Lake I've never even set eyes on before this summer, so I was excited for the ride. My partner was Scott MacPherson, a good friend I met when he and my wife Kat attended law school at Syracuse University together.

Now, Scott is a staff attorney at Volunteer Legal Services Project, which is another of those crucial services that you may never have heard of. It provides free legal counsel to people who couldn't otherwise afford it. It's really good work that he's doing there.

Our weather was really good, and since it's a pretty short lake I assumed we'd just breeze right around. My map indicated one little hill, but nothing alarming. Right?

Something I've learned from experience: roads with the word "hill" in them are not kind to cyclists. Moon Hill Road at the southwest end of Otisco is a case in point. The climb was barely half a mile long but rose at an 18 percent grade, which is significantly more than I've seen on Hemlock, Seneca or anywhere else.

This is how I got up: ride for 200 feet; topple off my bike gasping for air; sit on the side of the road for five minutes; repeat. It took a lot of repetitions. So many that Scott, who had the good sense to walk his bike up, texted me from the top of the hill letting me know he'd wait for me.

Thanks, Scott!

After that little hiccup, we had a beautiful ride the rest of the way around. It was a great day on an out-of-the way lake. I hope to go back again.

Now I'm caught up on the blog, with just three lakes left. Coming up next: Canandaigua Lake, this Saturday. I can't help but noticing a lot of the roads are named after hills.

Skaneateles Lake

Please donate to my fundraiser for Nurse-Family Partnership! Only three lakes left!

A sampling of reactions to the fact that my sister Laura was going to be riding around Skaneateles Lake this weekend:

My (our) mother: "If she can't make it, what are you going to do?"
My wife: "Should I come and wait in Skaneateles just in case?"
Her husband: "I don't know, maybe she's been training, but every day when I come home the bike is in the same place."

Family of haters! Forty-five miles and several hours later, I can report that Laura is not only still alive, but made it around the entire lake without being towed or driven. Good job, Laura!

It was all the more impressive because, for the first time this summer, I had some bad weather. It was bright enough when we started down East Lake Road, but after about an hour it started to drizzle, then rain lightly, then freaking rain a lot. Cold rain. It didn't help when A) the "town" of Scott at the south end of the lake turned out not to be a thing at all, so we couldn't take a break anywhere indoors; or B) when a friendly mailman sent us down the wrong road for two miles during peak rainfall.

We were rewarded once we rounded the lake, though, with a stretch of beautiful vacation houses on Glen Haven Road on the southwest shore. They were tucked into the heavily wooded hillside in an amazing variety of construction. I'd never been down there before, even when I worked in Skaneateles, but it's definitely on my list for a return visit.

The rain let up after about two hours and we had a nice ride back into town. Now that Skaneateles is finished, I've got just three lakes left: Canandaigua next weekend, Keuka the following and Cayuga the one after that.

Thanks for reading and please donate!

Conesus Lake and some important Murphy family news

Please visit my GoFundMe page, where I'm $49 short of $1,500!

It was a productive weekend for Finger Lakes bike riding, as I knocked off two lakes in two days. Saturday I rode around Otisco with my good friend Scott MacPherson. I'll wait to write about that one until later this week, though, because my ride Sunday was special for a few reasons.

Conesus Lake is probably the Finger Lake where I've spent the most time; it's closest to Rochester and my aunts Kathy and Patty live there year-round. I started and finished there Sunday, and got to visit with them, my cousin Charlsey and her husband J.T. afterward, which was great.

The main reason I was excited for this ride, though, was because my wife Kat was doing it with me. She's quite an athlete - she used to play competitive ice hockey - but I saved one of the shortest lakes for our ride together.

Not because she couldn't handle something longer. It's just that she's 13 weeks pregnant.

Kat is going to be an amazing mom. She's a planner - maybe even an over-planner - and it didn't take long for her to research the best prenatal vitamins, what not to eat and where to give birth. We've been religious about meeting with our midwife from URMC and reading our baby books. If you have a few hours to kill, ask us what names we're considering.

In brief, Little Murphy is going to have every advantage we can give him or her, and that's how it ought to be. We're nervous as any first-time parents are, but we know we have the support, knowledge and resources to raise our child right-ish.

That may sound familiar from your own experience raising (or being) children. And while much of that maternal instinct is innate, not all of it is. A lot of our parenting will be learned behavior from our own parents, who did a great job. But what if we hadn't had their example?

You see where I'm going with this. I've been writing for months that helping at-risk first-time mothers-to-be is an important thing to do. Now that my own wife is a first-time mother-to-be, it really hits home.

We know how much there is to worry about and to learn. Kat and I are picking it up as fast as we can before our delivery arrives in late January. We both believe strongly that every other young woman in the same position deserves the same support and knowledge we're getting.

Please donate to the dang charity. I'll post more updates soon, about the biking and the baby.

Seneca Lake, and something you can do

If you find this interesting, please donate to my charity at GoFundMe!

I rode 79 miles around Seneca Lake on Saturday, by myself. It's the only one of my 10 rides I expect to do alone - but, like most everyone else in our country, I had a lot to think about anyway.

Don't worry, I'll be brief.

How can we hold in mind at the same time both the ongoing, centuries-old tragedy of the treatment of black people in America and also the need to support, not demonize, the people whose job it is to uphold our laws? Can we find a way to talk about the bias each of us carries around every day without devolving to hypocrisy and shaming?

I find this sort of rhetorical exercise tiresome. Even writing those two sentences was tiresome.

Here's what I think. It has always been a feature of humanity on Earth that there are opportunities to help people. I'm inclined to believe that feature was created on purpose, but that's another point.

Those opportunities (that is, instances of human suffering) exist in an abundance and variety we can scarcely conceive of. You could never get to the end of them if you dedicated 10 lifetimes to it.

The trick, though, is that you have to actually act on them. And that's where everyone gets stuck. How many Facebook posts or news stories have you seen in the last two weeks that finish in some hopeless rhetorical question? What can I do? When will things change? What's the matter with everyone?

Look: there are literally thousands of people in Rochester, or wherever you are living, who will give you something to do that will lead to a demonstrable improvement in the state of the world.

If you go to a food cupboard, they'll say: put these potatoes in this box. If you go to a hospice, they'll say: take these sheets and go change that bed. If you go to a school, they'll say: take this book and read it to that kid.

Those are things that make things better, and you can pick any one you like. That's a blessing!

The subtext here is that I want you to donate money to the charity I'm riding around all these lakes for. Nurse-Family Partnership is good at that simple declarative sentence kind of help: they pay nurses to spend a lot of time with poor pregnant teenagers so their babies have half a shot at a healthy, successful, fulfilling life. That's not a hashtag; that's actually changing the world.

I guess I wasn't terribly brief after all.

About Seneca Lake: that was the longest I've ever ridden my bike in one shot, and I was feeling it by the end. The last 15 miles or so were very challenging. It was a great sense of accomplishment, though, to look back across the lake to where I had been riding six hours earlier and know I'd gone that far on my own locomotion.

Better yet, while I was doing it, four people donated a combined $95, bringing my total above $1,300. Thanks to Christine, Bill, Dave and Brian. We're accomplishing something.

Honeoye Lake

Click here to donate to Nurse-Family Partnership through my GoFundMe page!

After two nearly all-day affairs, 18-mile Honeoye Lake was a pleasant break. It was all the more enjoyable because I did it with my largest riding party yet - David Riley, Ben Jacobs and Ryan Miller, all colleagues from the Democrat and Chronicle.

The Friday night before the ride, Ryan and I were working late at the paper, Ben was at the Jazz Festival and David was up with his infant daughter. Nonetheless, the four of us gathered at Honeoye High School just before 8 a.m. to set out down the east side of the lake.

Like Owasco Lake, a significant portion of the length of the ride is actually due to a marsh at the south end of the lake. In fact, Honeoye Lake itself is only about 4.5 miles long, the second-shortest Finger Lake after Canadice, I think.

We rode at a fairly good clip, stopped just once for a drink of water and rolled back into the high school at about 9:30 a.m. As on my last two rides, the weather was great.

I won't be riding the next two weekends, but plan to resume July 16 for Seneca Lake, which is the second-longest ride at 77 miles. Until then, have a Happy Fourth of July, and thanks for your support of Nurse-Family Partnership.

Owasco Lake

Please visit my GoFundMe page to donate to Nurse-Family Partnership in Rochester!

After an unforeseen one-week break, I restarted my ride Saturday at Owasco Lake with my good friend, former colleague and Twitter personality Robert Harding. It was a hot, sunny day for a 30-mile ride.

(OK, I recognize the videography has a ways to go, but at least I figured out the GoPro this time.)

Owasco Lake is in Cayuga County, with Auburn at the north end and Moravia at the south. I guess it's one of the least-known or visited lakes, but I got to know it well while working for two years at the Citizen newspaper in Auburn, where I met Bob. I made water quality part of my news beat there and learned a lot about invasive species, agricultural pesticide overflow and that sort of thing.

Compared with Canadice and Hemlock, Owasco was a pretty flat ride but we took it slow and finished by the early afternoon. Bob's wife Sarah was awesome as road crew, bringing water at the halfway point and taking our sweaty photo when we got back to Emerson Park at the end.

That now makes three of 11 Finger Lakes completed. Next Saturday, I'll be doing Honeoye Lake with David Riley and perhaps some other Democrat and Chronicle colleagues. In the meantime, please visit my GoFundMe page to support the riding and my charity of choice, Nurse-Family Partnership.

A good reason not to ride

I planned on riding around Keuka Lake Saturday, but it didn't happen.

Earlier this week, my dad had a routine appointment with a cardiologist, who thought it might be a good idea to go in for a closer look and, possibly, a stent in one of his arteries. Not a big deal.

When they got in there, though, they instead found that three arteries were nearly completely blocked. While he had never had a heart attack nor shortness of breath nor any other symptoms, he seemingly had nearly no blood flow to his heart.

He was scheduled immediately for triple bypass surgery on Saturday afternoon. That's when my cycling plans went out the window. My mother, my siblings and I and our spouses spent the afternoon in the waiting room at Strong Memorial Hospital, staring at his number on the monitor and trying to keep ourselves distracted.

Everything went great. He's in recovery now and already back making stupid jokes, even though he's on doctor's orders not to laugh, lest he tear his open chest wound apart.

It was a blessing beyond description that my dad went to get checked out before he had a heart attack. So today, instead of bothering you all for a donation to my charity (though you can still do that if you want!), I have a different request: if you have some preventive health care you've been putting off, please stop putting it off and make a doctor's appointment in the morning. Please consider, at least for your family's sake, that it could save your life.

The riding begins again next Saturday, on Owasco Lake with my good friend Bob Harding.

Back on the road

After two weeks away from my bicycle, I'm starting riding again this Saturday. My good friend John Forbush and I will be heading out bright and early to Keuka Lake, probably my favorite of the Finger Lakes. Its Y shape, unique among the lakes, provides for some incredible vantage points, particularly on the bluff in the middle.
It's a 55-mile ride with little elevation change, so it should be very pleasant. I've also figured out my GoPro camera, so hopefully I'll have some nice footage to share afterward.
Please remember, all this bike riding is not only fun but intended to raise money for a good cause. Please look at my GoFundMe page for more details!

The first ride: Canadice and Hemlock lakes

After a few months of talking, I finally got my Finger Lakes ride underway on Sunday with Canadice and Hemlock lakes.
Canadice (the smaller, eastern one) and Hemlock are right side-by-side, south of Rochester and between Honeoye and Conesus lakes. They're best known as the water source for the city of Rochester. The water flows completely via gravity about 30 miles north to Cobb's Hill and Highland reservoirs, then again via gravity to taps throughout the city.
Because we drink from them, it's especially important that they be kept free of pollution. As such, they're the only two lakes with absolutely no development along the shorelines. New York state owns all the land in the area, including an extensive state forest. It's a really great place for a hike.

As I mentioned earlier, I called on my friend Buddy Nyhof for the ride. It was an absolutely beautiful day and we were enjoying catching up with each other so much that we hardly noticed the first climb going south on Bald Hill Road on our way around Hemlock. Because of the fact that the shorelines are undeveloped, we couldn't actually see the lake for our entire circuit around it, but the day was pleasant enough without it.
We had one very steep hill coming back around the south end of Hemlock, but otherwise finished the first, longer part of the ride in pretty good shape. We stopped back at Hemlock Lake Park for lunch and a rest, then got going on what was supposedly the easier half of the day, the much-shorter Canadice Lake.
We had to go back up Bald Hill Road again, and we noticed right away that the climb we'd tackled without a sweat a few hours earlier felt a lot steeper the second time around. We weren't chit-chatting quite as much on our way up. It was only a few miles, though, and we then were treated with a long coast down a mostly empty road on the hillside and then a beautiful path on the east side of Canadice, where there is an access road right near the water.
The last few miles were on Purcell Hill Road. Actually, almost every road we rode on had the word 'hill' in the name, and Purcell Hill came by it honestly. After about 40 miles of up-and-down riding, we had a monster of an up-hill a few miles from the end of the day.
I won't speak for Buddy, but I almost died.
After that it was an easy coast back to the park and our car. It took a little longer than we planned for the 45 miles, but we had a great time. Unfortunately, I deleted the GoPro video off my computer like an idiot, but we did take this selfie video.

I'm taking a hiatus for a few weeks before my next ride: Honeoye Lake on June 11. I hope to be joined by some friends from the Democrat and Chronicle newsroom.
While I'm gone, please have a look at my GoFundMe page and consider donating to the Nurse-Family Partnership, helping create strong families through early intervention.

The first two lakes, with a ringer

I'll be honest - I'm a little anxious about some of these Finger Lakes rides. There are three less than 20 miles (Conesus, Honeoye, Otisco) and another handful that are only moderately hilly or fairly short. But I've never done any real hard riding, so looking at the topographical profiles on some of the longer routes gives me visions of long walks up a hill, pushing my bike like a chump.

So in the name of confronting my fears, I decided to change up my initial schedule and put the hilliest ride first. That's Canadice and Hemlock lakes (so I also get the benefit of crossing two of the 11 off at once). According to MapMyRide, the first nine miles going south on Marrowback Road will be the steepest of the whole summer.

It's not a ride for anyone; I decided to call in the big guns, my high school friend Buddy Nyhof. The good thing about having him for a partner is that he won't be too worried about a dinky little hill in Livingston County. That's because he already did one of these summer charity bike ride things - from Washington state to Maine, a total of 3,400 miles. He raised more than $7,000 for recycling and sustainability in the Fairport Central School District, where he's a teacher. He's kind of a force of nature.

(I'm also obligated to point out that he had a memorable appearance on The Price Is Right.)

Buddy and I will be riding Sunday, May 22. I'll be using the next week to get ready. Once we finish, I'll have a post with photos, maybe video and a recap.

If you find this interesting, please visit my GoFundMe page and make a donation to Nurse-Family Partnership, which connects nurses with poor first-time moms to help them through pregnancy and the first two years of the baby's life.

Why Nurse-Family Partnership?

When I first had the idea of doing a bike ride around the Finger Lakes, I didn't think of it as a fundraiser. It was simply that I'd just bought my first new bike in many years (a sweet matte black Specialized Diverge) and I wanted to take it for a spin. Once it occurred to me, though, there was still the matter of deciding where to direct the money. I thought about it quite a bit before deciding, so I thought I'd explain why I eventually chose Nurse-Family Partnership.
My first thought was to do something having to do with either cycling or education, since that's what I report on for the Democrat and Chronicle. There are several cool local bicycling-related organizations, most prominently R Community Bikes. If you haven't heard of them, take a look. They take donated bicycles, tune them up and give them away for free to people in Rochester. They also sell some of the nicer bikes to help fund the enterprise; I bought one a few years ago for basic commuting after my previous bike was stolen.
The idea is to provide reliable transportation for adults, and some fun for kids. They do free repairs and serve a huge demand. Go down Hudson Avenue one Saturday morning when they're doing the giveaway and look at how long the line is to get an idea of the need. They also recently began modifying bikes for people with disabilities, which I wrote about.
There are also a lot of education-related charities, many of which I've written about at one time or another. Most of them are properly speaking charities supporting kids on the periphery of their actual in-school education. There were two ideas that stuck with me: Nurse-Family Partnership and Dreamkeepers, a scholarship program at Monroe Community College that provides a few final dollars to help keep students from dropping out for financial reasons. I've talked to a number of Rochester students who have had to quit college because they couldn't afford a few hundred dollars for books, class fees or food - this program helps with that.
I described Nurse-Family Partnership in my GoFundMe page, but in brief, it connects first-time, low-income mothers (mostly teenagers) with a nurse for the first two years of their child's life, making sure they have the skills and access to resources they need. So it ended up a decision between an intervention early in life or one early in adulthood. I went back and forth before choosing the former, in part because I thought it would inspire more people to donate. I hope that's the case!

Welcome to my Finger Lakes ride

Hello all, welcome to the blog for my Finger Lakes bike ride this summer. In brief: I'll be riding around each of the 11 Finger Lakes between May and August with the goal of raising money for the Nurse-Family Partnership in Rochester, which supports first-time moms living in poverty who could use the help.

For more about that, go to my GoFundMe page.

The point of this blog is to post updates about the rides, including my friends who will be doing some of the lakes with me, as well as some more background information about the Nurse-Family Partnership, which is really an amazing program. I'm also going to try to figure out how to do time-lapse videos with a GoPro; if I can manage that, you'll see those here as well.

My first ride is Saturday, May 21 around probably my favorite one of the lakes, Keuka. I'll have a few posts before then.

Two important points: first of all, that fundraising link up there. I'd really appreciate whatever donation you can manage. Second: if you'd like to join me on a ride, let me know! I've got people lined up for a few, but there's always room for more.