Day 8 – Boonville,NY to Fulton,NY

Date: 06.05.2018

Altitude: 2916.7 ft (889 m)

Distance: 77.55 mi (124.80 km)

Total Altitude: 22414.7 ft (6832 m)

Total Distance: 446.09 mi (717.91 km)

This is already the third day in New York and the third day on the Northern Tier route. New York has so far been the state where I have spent the most time and I will continue to be in New York for another couple days. Today, I had again quite a few miles ahead of me, so that I got up early in order to get an early start. I managed to be on the road by 8am, after a surprisingly good breakfast at the motel. Since I seemed to be the only guest at the motel, the staff just took my order and made everything fresh.

After breakfast, I started on my route to Fulton,NY. I expected it to be again a strenuous day, because the distance I had to cover was about the same as yesterday. Surprisingly this wasn't the case, everything went really easy and it was kind of a “relaxing” ride. After I have left the Adirondacks yesterday, the route today was a lot flatter and I actually lost quite a bit of altitude over the day, so this made it a lot easier to cover the distance. It stayed cloudy for the whole ride today, but the temperature was still pretty comfortable to ride in. Just as the last few days I stayed mainly on county roads with limited traffic, except for a short stretch on an state highway with lots of traffic, which wasn't a whole lot of fun to drive on. The shoulder on the state highway was really narrow and there was a lot of traffic, so most cars passed me really narrowly. In general it was still an enjoyable ride

The scenery changed in comparison to the last few days, on my way westwards to Lake Ontario and than southbound to Fulton,NY. The route still went through forest areas, along rivers and lakes, but at the same time there was more and more farmland and farms along the way. But it was still a beautiful scenery to ride through and it was nice to have a change in scenery. Since there were more houses and farms along the road, there were also a lot more dogs by the road. Most of them just barked at me, but I also got chased, for the first time on my trip, by a dog. At first I didn't rally see him and suddenly he was just behind me. Luckily the dog turned around after a while. An experience that wasn't really a whole lot of fun, but I guess it will not have been the last time.

Conclusion for the day:

As long as your fast enough, the dog can't bite you.