After the rest day, I was ready to ride! When I woke up though, the weather wasn’t on the same page as me. It was still raining even though the weather said it was only supposed to be cloudy, but NO rain in the forecast. It wasn’t raining very hard and I figured it was going to stop at any time so I took off. It stopped raining within 30 minutes thank goodness.
I am going to transition to a new map today and I hadn’t really looked at it yet to see what lied ahead for me. Well, it was riding through Buffalo, NY. Not a big deal but a surprise to me since I thought I was going to ride to the south of it.
One thing I did know, I was going to ride through Orchard Park, NY. I knew there was something about Orchard Park that sounded familiar to me but I couldn’t figure it out at all. There was Menlo Park, Hyde Park, but what was it about Orchard Park?
As I was riding and looking for a place to have lunch, I figured it out. Well, I should say the answer came to me as I rounded a corner on the road.
The “Buffalo” Bills professional football team has their stadium in Orchard Park! That was it. Problem solved.
Now on the new map it was on to Buffalo and past to find a place to camp. Riding through Buffalo was easy enough. I felt like it took a long time to get out of the east side though. I rode on Hwy 384 for a long time before I felt I was out of the city.
I identified a KOA campground on Grand Island as my camping destination for the evening. To get there, I had to ride over a huge bridge that carried Interstate 190, my first time EVER riding on the interstate system. I did not have to ride on the shoulder though. They had a separated bike and pedestrian path on the bridge so it was stressless.
At the KOA I camped next to a young couple from Massachusetts who just happened to be moving to the Seattle area. That was a bit of a coincidence we all thought.
It was good to get back on the road again.