Visiting the St. Lawrence Valley SPCA

Like last year, we complete our visits to SPCAs and animal shelters in Ogdensburg with the St. Lawrence Valley SPCA. This shelter had great success with the Pedaling4Paws effort last year and it became a prototype for this year as we used the idea of creating individualized press releases for the media and unique posters summarizing the ride and the needs of the specific SPCA in a given geography. We also created unique donation labels for each place we visited and it seems to be working, albeit never as well or as fast as we’d like. Here we are posing at the entrance and with the Stillman Volvo XC-90.

We are also happy to say that the Ogdensburg Journal already published a story about the ride (though the word processor that reporter Benny Fairchild used must have been an i-phone like what I use for the blogging because our ride was named “Peddling 4 Paws”) and that we hope the results will be equally as positive as last year!

The visit was fun and we saw plenty of beautiful animals ready to be adopted. In fact, while we were feasting on a great lunch provided for us, we saw a fellow bring in two dogs. Of course, we did a tour of their shelter and this is a very nice facility that strives to keep the animals in large cages, giving the healthy ones access to the outdoors and giving play time to all of them. The animals may prefer being adopted but they are certainly well taken care of.

You can see for yourself in these few photos and notice Gary with his friend Raina!

That’s it for now. We’ll do a recap of the day shortly and update the blog to add more detail either tonight or early next week.

We Made It to the Border!

5 Days, 500+ Miles and we made it to the US-Canada border! The best news for today is that the speed stayed around 23 mph for the entire 65 miles thanks to the terrain and tailwind!! Here we are with our now signature “Raising our bikes” pose and the border/bridge in the distance!

It always feels good to ride but finishing a long distance fundraising event like this is also very, very rewarding. We won’t celebrate just yet because we still want to visit the St. Lawrence Valley SPCA, but we did celebrate a little as the riding brought us to the border.

More soon!

A Rest Stop in Hammond

Even short rides have a rest stop when you are Pedaling4Paws! Ours was at mile 40 in the town of Hammond. We has no issues other than wet roads out of Watertown and a slight delay to allow a hers of cattle to cross the road. Fortunately, we were able to find a path between the droppings…

We made great time after leaving the SPCA with a 22.4 mph average thanks to relatively flat terrain and a slight tail wind.

The stop was pretty short and no photos or blogging as we were concerned about the weather. Next stop is the border!

Visiting the Jefferson County SPCA

Our first visit this morning is to the Jefferson County SPCA in Watertown. We visited this SPCA last year and were met by a reporter from YNN. We also found the facility to be run by a family with Angel Munsen heading up the place.

This year, our visit is with John and Suzie.

The animals that are here are still cute as can be and though different from last year, their needs remain the same – they are looking for good homes and kind souls who can donate time, money, or certain goods. Hopefully our friends in the Watertown area can help out and once we get back, I will update this blog with additional information.

Day Five – The Last Day – Begins

Our last day is a relatively short one but it has us scheduled for two SPCA visits. The first will be the Jefferson County SPCA at 8:30AM and the second will be at or before 1:30pm At the St. Lawrence Valley SPCA in Ogdensburg, our final destination. Like last year, the plan is to get to the border and then go to the SPCA. Hopefully the weather will behave better than the 50+ degree rain we rode in last year… Here’s what it looks like now.

Anyway, breakfast is at the hotel and in a huge area that probably doubles as reception hall.

Soon we will hit the road!

On a related note, Mike now has to fly to the west coast for business in Sunday, so we had to change plans with Yves Dupont for the Ogdensburg arrival. The bottom line, shortly after we finish visiting with the SPCA, we will be heading back to Mike’s place in Marcellus. It’s too bad that we won’t be able to spend much time with Yves this year, but he said, “No problem, there’s a Bluegrass Concert I can now go to!” What a trooper!!

Day Four is Done!

I am happy to say that we finished our ride by 4:00pm as we hit Watertown and our destination, the Best Western Carriage House Inn.

After checking in, we spoke to Jeri McInnis, the General Manager of the place. It turns out that Jeri is an animal lover too and has two cats that she rescued and a dog! We talked about ideas for next year’s ride and how to get more and more local community support for the cause. It’s always great when those types of discussions occur!!

Once showered up, we headed off to dinner at the Tilted Kilt (Mike is posting about that) and greatly enjoyed the dinner with Rich, Brian, Brad, and later on Allison, Rich’s wife, as she came by to pick the full day riders up. Way to go guys and see you all next year for the full distance! With luck the 11 riders this year will seem small next year and future years to come! Anyway, here’s a quick photo of the place taken as we were leaving!

At least you can see the parking lot… Mike will fill in the rest.

Dinner at the Tilted Kilt in Watertown

Here's Rich enjoying himself at the Tilted Kilt

Sometimes things happen for reasons that we just can’t explain. For example, we had Rich Conely and Brian Six from the Beer Path Cycling Club join us on our Marcellus to Watertown leg our our ride.   This was the longest ride either on these guys have done to date-a total of 104.5 miles with an average speed of 17.5 mph.

Great job guys!  We look forward to riding with you next year!
As a way to say “Thanks”, Rich took us to the Tilted Kilt (http://www.tiltedkilt.com/) in Watertown.  Not sure how Rich knows about this fine eating establishment, but let’s just say the food wasn’t the only thing that was good.  I must admit, after spending 6 hours in the saddle with the sun beating down on your back, it was refreshing to sit and watch….um, the BIG screen TVs.  Actually, the food was really good and beer was cold and refreshing.  All in all, it was a fitting end to a really nice day on bikes.
Tomorrow we have a stop at the Jefferson County SPCA then it’s off to Ogdensburg!

Ride On!

Quick Rest Stop in Adams

Let’s talk about dropping people. As most people know, I can be competitive and when Brian jump ahead of me a first time, I said “Okay, no problem. I won’t take the bait but I will just slowly catch him”. When he did it the second time, I took off in front of him and after about 5 minutes, I let him get to about 30 feet back and then kicked it up to 35 mph. I did that 3 more times before my smirk factor was low enough to stop. By then I let Brian catch me and we saw that the next town was Adams, our targeted rest stop, so we rolled into an American Legion and waited and waited and waited for the rest. As I stand here blogging, they still haven’t shown up, so here’s the photo of Brian.

Oh and by the way, we also stopped in Selkirk Shores State Park which is off Route 3 and right on Lake Ontario.

You may be able to notice that the Nine Mile Point nuclear reactor tower in Oswego in in the background. I will take a photo or two when the others arrive and post when done… still waiting.

Lunch at Cam’s in Mexico

At mile 57, we stopped for lunch at Cam’s Pizzeria in Mexico.

Each of the gang had a couple of slices and a drink and were raring to return to the road after about 30 minutes. Rich, one of our guest riders, had a flat around mile 40, so we were worried that we would be done the day of riding a touch later than expected, but we are still making excellent time. Maybe going faster makes the food taste better or maybe we are just gluttons, but we were done very quickly today!. Jay from Cam’s served up the food.

See you at the next rest stop or dinner, whichever comes first!

Visiting Welch Allyn and the Finger Lakes SPCA

Rain, rain, go away… Yep, the rain returned about 5 minutes after we got on the bikes. It was more than enough to mess up the road and to make us wet. That said, the rain was mostly done as we arrived at Welch Allyn to meet with many of the staff. Some came out to ride with us and others came by to see us off. Welch Allyn is a great supporter of Pedaling4Paws and we appreciate their help tremendously. At Welch Allyn, we were also visited by the Finger Lakes SPCA, one of the shelters we support.

Notice the big group of cyclists! A couple rode with us for about 20 miles and then had to leave to get back to work. Others ended up turning around at mile 40 or so and a couple went the full 100 miles! Total riders in the morning: 11!! That turned out to be more than our hometown of West Chester! Way to go!!!

Once we passed mile 40, the remaining 5 of us continued on to Mexico for lunch and beyond.

Day Four begins with Blue Skies

Another huge rainstorm overnight but we wake up to a very promising site – blue skies!

With clothes all washed and air dried the night before, we sat down for breakfast at Mike’s kitchen table. It was nice to pad around in bare feet and not have to look for a restaurant and we certainly had enough in bagels, oatmeal and juice/coffee/tea.

Our bikes were cleaned up yesterday though we fully expect them to get dirty again today (even if just from the standing water of the night before). We are just about ready to head out to Welch Allyn for a visit with them and the Finger Lakes SPCA (they are visiting with us there). We are also looking forward to riding with more people today as we begin Day Four and the 100 or so miles up to Watertown.

Humane Society Visit on the News

Check out our visit to the Humane Society in Binghamton

http://www.newschannel34.com/mediacenter/local.aspx?videoid=2578403

Day Three is Done!

We made it to Mike’s house in Marcellus and the last segment was rain free. The ride took us past Otisco Lake.

Once past the lake, it was a quick ride into Marcellus.

When we got to Mike’s, the first thing was to wash the bikes and then to shower so we could head to dinner.

From Mike’s place we went to Daniel’s Grill for dinner.

Our server was Chris and life was good pretty quickly.

We also met up with the Beer Path Cycling Club which is made up of Mike’s buddies and mostly neighbors including Rich and Brian.

They plan to ride with us tomorrow too so it should be a blast! Let’s hope the weather is better (but the forecast is not good…) until then…

Visiting the Cortland County SPCA

After another downpour shortly after lunch as we rolled up towards Cortland, we arrived at the Cortland County SPCA.

Thus may well be one of the nicest SPCAs around. We were met by Sandy who runs the place and the mascot Princess (Princess is posing with us below)

As we were there, a dad (Rog Simpson) and his daughter Beth came by to visit with a dog named Chance.

We did a nice tour and visited with the dogs and cats.

As we prepared to leave, we noticed their adoption board and hope it keeps full all the time!

From there we headed up to Marcellus and Skaneateles to end out 127 mile day!

Lunch in Whitney Point

A few minutes after passing about 15 Southern Tier riders (2 of which stopped for a photo) and talking about how it would have been nice to eat lunch and ride with them a bit, we arrived at the Country Kitchen.

To prove that the world is truly a small place, we met up with fellow WCCC rider Bob Voynow! Bob was up in the area for work and saw the Stillman Volvo and our WCCC jerseys!

When we finally went in for lunch, Kris took care of us

Our meal was delicious and the locals were very friendly.

The other good news – the rain has stopped for now and though socks and shoes are still wet and drivetrains unhappy, we are still much happier!

Onto Cortland and their SPCA!