Weds Sep 6 - Geneva NY to Ashtabula OH

Slept like a baby (again) at Lynn's B&B (and BBQ). We insisted that we buy him breakfast so he took us to Waterloo where he is a regular at Connie's Diner. They have diners down over here in western NY. Bottomless coffee and good old eggs, home fries and toast for me. He took us on the scenic tour through both Geneva and Waterloo and these are two nice looking towns. Lots of flowers, banners, and tidy streets. Waterloo is the birthplace of Memorial Day when in 1866, right after the Civil War, the town declared a day of remembrance for the war dead, and it stuck and was adopted throughout the US.

We stopped at the Scythe Tree where a young farm boy hung his scythe each day, and left it there the day before he joined the army to go fight in the civil war. He never returned and they left his scythe in the tree as a memorial to him. The tree still stands and you can still see the tip of the scythe sticking out of the tree which enveloped it over the last 160 years. What an awful war.
We said out goodbyes and thank you's for putting us up and feeding us, and with black skies overhead, we got back on Rt 20 with full rain gear on.

It was not long before my trusty old beemer turned over 100,000 miles! This old girl has been with me 20 years and is still going strong despite a few rattles and squeaks. It's still got some heavy lifting to do in the next few weeks so she is not done yet.
Rt 20 was pretty calm but started to get busy when we got near Buffalo, as we expected it would. We dropped down to Rt 20A which bypassed most of the Buffalo sprawl and picked Rt 20 up again on the shore of Lake Erie. There are three roads that run parallel down the lake shore. Rt 90 is the interstate where most of the traffic goes now. Rt 20 is the old through road and has lots of the old businesses, factories and houses that made up the commerce belt along the shore. Rt 5 is a smaller road that hugs the water and is a bit less busy and surprisingly not built up. The shore of Lake Erie was much less built up than I had expected. While there were a few mega-mansions, they were the exception. Mostly it was old small town an camps scattered down the shore.
We got rained on briefly, but nothing like yesterday and once again, we had good gear. Lots of working farms growing corn and soy, but also a whole lot of grapes. The Lake must temper the climate because there were grapes growing everywhere. A few tasting rooms, but we suspect that these are grown for large production wine and/or other grape products (Welches?).
About 6:00 we decided to call it a a day in Ashtabula and there were several motels, none of them chains. We asked about and found the best of two Mexican restaurants in town and then back to the room to make some calls and fall asleep.