National Week With[out] Driving, take 3

On the Friday of the National Week Without Driving challenge, I flew to Syracuse, NY, because I was presenting a writing workshop on Saturday. 

How does one get from my home to the airport at 5am on a Friday?

Mass transit is not an option. We have no light rail to the airport. We have bus service, but the earliest weekday bus leaves the downtown Durham station at 5:42am, and takes a little over an hour to get to Terminal 2. My flight left at 6:45.

My choices: 1) take an Uber, $40+ one way excluding tip; 2) ask a friend to get up at 4:something a.m. to give me a ride; or 3) drive myself there in 20 minutes, park in the convenient garage right across from the terminal, and have my car waiting for me when I landed back at RDU at 11:30pm Saturday night so I could drive myself home.

I drove.

Once I landed in Syracuse, I had almost 6 hours before I needed to meet up with my workshop hosts. Since I was significantly behind on walking miles for the week, I plugged my cellphone charger into an outlet at the airport and looked up potential walking routes from the airport to my hotel near the university.

The two options I found were 9 and 11 miles. 

Since I was traveling with only a light backpack, walking was a real option--except that I didn't know the area. I googled crime statistics, and the areas I would need to walk through had lower reported crime rates than the neighborhoods around the university. 

The 9-mile option offered a designated bike trail--the Bear Trap Creek Trail--that offered a safe route for 3.8 miles paralleling the freeway, and would end near neighborhood roads that looked easily walkable on the map--except that getting from the airport to the start of the trail involved a big freeway interchange that looked potentially challenging. The 11-mile route required cutting around the back of the airport on a cargo road through an industrial area that looked like it would probably be an ugly slog.

I took an Uber (~$30 including tip, expense covered by workshop hosts).

I asked the driver his opinion about whether walking the whole way was actually feasible. He was confident it was, and changed his route to the hotel so that he could point out a potential road to walk on. "Look at how wide the shoulder is," he said; "it's like that the whole way!" Having walked on a lot of shoulders in Durham, it looked doable, if largely commercial. Maybe next time.

When I checked in at my hotel, I asked whether there was a safe walking route to Lake Onondaga. When my partner, S, briefly taught at SUNY ESF 23 years ago, Lake Onondaga was contaminated with toxic chemicals; swimming had been banned in 1940, fishing followed in 1970, and in 1994, the EPA  added the lake to the list of national priority Superfund sites. Now the lake is cleaner than it's been in over 100 years, and that seemed like a good reason to make it a destination for a walk.

I asked the hotel receptionist, "can I walk there safely, or am I likely to get run over by a car or shot?"

She thought I'd probably get run over. The adjacent receptionist interrupted another customer's check-in to agree. They insisted over and over--with the other customer patiently waiting--that traffic was awful, there was no safe route, and I'd surely get hit by a car. Adjacent receptionist advised me to take a nice 1.5-mile walk around a nearby park instead.

They didn't know--and I didn't know, until I walked to the lake despite their warnings--that the Onondaga Creekwalk could safely get me most of the way there, starting just a few blocks from the hotel. The Creekwalk is part of the Empire State Trail--New York's equivalent to NC's Mountains-to-Sea Trail.

Walking is my favorite way to get to know an area, and Syracuse offered a lot to see and learn.

The most challenging spot was crossing the street a few blocks from the hotel. Note that the teeny tiny yield sign (half the size of the right-turn arrow sign) tells drivers to yield to pedestrians--yet there's no zebra-stripe crosswalk. I found a safer place to cross.

Syracuse has public art. Which of these buildings are buildings, and which are murals?

Syracuse has monumental architecture...

Syracuse has statues. I could tell even from the back side that this was a statue of Christopher Columbus. Note that he's basically standing atop the heads of Native Americans. This 1934 statue in theory celebrates Syracuse's Italian immigrants, but I was surprised that the blatant colonialist imagery had lasted into 2023. Googling later for more information, I was glad to read that the sculpture has generated some controversy, and that city government is hoping to remove it.   

More welcoming than the Columbus statue...

Impressively flat flatiron building:

Art in front of Clinton Square Fountain...

A statue depicting the "Jerry Rescue." The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act required citizens in free states to cooperate in returning fugitive slaves to their enslavers. William "Jerry" Henry was a fugitive who had been enslaved in Missouri and had fled to Syracuse in 1849. His enslaver made a claim for his return, and Jerry was arrested in Syracuse on October 1, 1851. An abolitionist mob stormed the jail the same day, extricated him from his captors, and aided his eventual escape to Canada.

The 1932 art deco Niagara Mohawk Power Building: 

Well whaddya know, there's a designated trail the entire rest of the way to Lake Onondaga.... 

...with wildflowers...

...and safe routes under busy streets...

A detour was required...

...due to a bridge that was out.

I took a detour from the detour and instead crossed the creek one bridge earlier.

While the lake is now clean enough to swim in in some areas, it's still not safe to eat fish from the creek or the lake.  

Syracuse

(Unsafe fish: that's something the Creekwalk has in common with Umstead State Park in NC.)

Raleigh

The Trail was undergoing more construction near the harbor, which required additional detouring... 

I rejoined the Empire State Trail beyond the harbor. The trail along the lake was lined with solar-powered lamps:

Behind the lamps, the Onondaga County Department of Water Environment Protection was burning gas from sewage treatment...

The trail crossed over the train tracks...

...and down to the lake.

Lake to the right, freeway to the left. The exit sign on the freeway aims drivers to the NY State Fairgrounds.

A lotta snails were out and about...

Heading back over the bridge above the train tracks...

I decided to take a different route back, rather than returning on the Creekwalk. As buildings became increasingly run down, I adjusted my route to aim back into downtown. The graffiti at the top of this building says "Love Will Tear Us Apart." It must have been painted upside-down from the roof--an impressive feat.

Back past the Niagara Mohawk Building...

And back past another not-quite-flat-iron building...

Ta da! 11.3 mostly scenic miles, and I didn't get run over even once.