I woke up to a cool morning and actually got to use my sleeping bag the way it was intended instead of just sleeping on top of it! After packing everything up, I got a move on and found out that I had forgotten that there's not a complete towpath after Lockport and had to plot a new route down some roads near the canal, but eventually got back to an off-road trail next to the canal.
Going through Buffalo took me longer than expected, there's a few points where I was thankful I had a smartphone with google maps to see if I was headed in the right direction. I started getting a very decent headwind coming out of the south west which was just going to make the rest of the day that much harder.
When I got out of Buffalo the ACA maps had me head south to Orchard Park (the last section of my current map), which I didn't know at the time but this added almost 20 miles to my trip as I wanted to end in Dunkirk and stay with my first host family that I met through warmshowers.org. When I got to Orchard Park at about 5:30pm and 50 miles in, pulled out the next map, and to my dismay Dunkirk was 38 miles away. My error was when I used google maps earlier to get a rough distance of this route, it said it was only 65-ish miles to Dunkirk, but I didn't notice that the maps took me out to Orchard Park while google took me straight there.
I ended up cycling another 5 miles to Hamburg before calling my host family, the Coles, and telling them that I might not make it. Kim Marie and Tim turned out to be awesome people, they told me of an alternate route, route 20, that was more inland so I wouldn't have to fight the headwind next to the lake. They also said I could come show up whenever and if I needed, they would come pick me up.
So I took route 20 instead and wow... I went from fighting to maintain 12mph to doing 16-18 no problem. About 2 hours and 30 minutes later, I was standing outside their house in Dunkirk! Kim Marie and Tim were super nice, they let me grab a shower, fed me some tasty vegetarian food, and sleep in their spare bed.
Start: Lockport, NY
End: Dunkirk, NY
Distance: 88.41 miles
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