Earlier this year, Jim and Jan Donnelly sold or stored what they owned in Annapolis, Md., and shoved off for New York's Hudson River with son AJ, a dog and a cat.
They moored their 36-foot catamaran in Waterford, N.Y., a small town north of Albany, to do some sightseeing, tidy their boat and plot their course west on the Erie Canal. It's the second leg of a yearlong adventure that's taking them to the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi, along the Gulf Coast and up the Eastern Seaboard.
The Donnellys, like many people these days, are using the Erie Canal for pleasure, not business — a sea change from the original intent of this historic waterway that altered the face of commerce across New York and the Midwest by linking the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. Construction on this engineering feat began 200 years ago.
Although superseded by the railroads and New York State Thruway, both of which mirror the canal's route up the Mohawk River valley and west to Buffalo, N.Y., it still carries barges hauling freight too large to ship by land or air. But the canal is primarily for pleasure craft that glide through stunning countryside. The recreational boats are lifted or lowered through 35 elevation locks, docking at towns built along the celebrated thoroughfare of water.
When the labor-intensive construction was finished in 1825, the canal enabled settlers to sail west, while grain moved east on slender, shallow-draft wooden vessels. It transformed New York City into America's largest port and turned outposts like Cleveland and Chicago into mercantile hubs. The Erie's learn-as-you-go engineering created technological advances that made later canals at Suez and Panama possible.
You can drive alongside much of the 338-mile canal and see how the past and present collide. The state of New York has issued shoals of driving and bicycling maps and brochures for the bicentennial. Instead of the 4½-hour Interstate 90 toll-road zip from Albany to Buffalo, you can connect the canal-port dots on smaller highways.
Some parts of the original 40-foot-wide ditch, which was deepened and widened before the Civil War and expanded again a century ago, are still in use; others are ever-narrowing weed troughs. Many towns that depended on canal shipping now tout canal tourism, with inns and eateries catering to recreational boaters and other visitors who hike and bike along paved trails running along the canal corridor.
Got a kayak or canoe? Bring it. And you don't have to travel as leisurely as the Donnellys, whose blog (serenitysstory.blog) says they're moving at 4½ mph — just a tad faster than back in the day when mules on towpaths pulled boats of people and produce in the 1830s.
