Day 24: Pick a lock

River, waterfall... Today our tour of frozen waterways continued with a brief visit to the eastern-most end of the Erie Canal. The visit was brief because the snow was 2-3 inches thick on the ground and there was a fierce wind blowing and making it feel very cold. The open water was completely frozen, thick enough for people to be riding snowmobiles on it. The picture is of Lock 6. The locks in this section of the canal each produce a rise of about 30 feet (that's a three-storey building's worth). It's hard to get the scale from this picture, but that is a very wide and extremely deep lock (by UK standards anyway).

Today we also found further evidence that British people are seen as eccentric here. In a shop dedicated to faddish foods (ones with no artificial ingredients, free-range chicken, Feta made from sheep's milk) we also discovered such bastions of Britishness as Branston Pickle, Cadburys Flake and Bird's Custard Powder. However, the shop's British credentials may have been slightly damaged by their stocking of "Genuine Caerphilly Cheddar from England".
Mind you, Exile #2 has found herself saying that she's from England quite often and she's no more English than Caerphilly. I think she means that that's we're we've travelled from rather than being a denial her Celtic roots. It's probably an error anyway, everyone here seems to be Welsh, Scottish or Irish or have really enjoyed visiting one of them or knows someone who... Some of the places people mention that they have visited make the mind boggle - why would you go all that way and stay in (insert unlikely town name of your choice), but I can already see the conversations we'll be having on meeting an American in the UK. "Oh are you from the US? We lived in upstate New York for a while..." It may not be the most glamorous of locations, but every day so far has brought a new experience and the vast majority of them have been good ones.