Only with something like an Xtracycle can you be concerned about overpacking when bicycle camping. Emily loaded what she could onto the rack of Magdalena, her blue road bike, and the rest went into the ample bags of my longtail.

The weather report is saying 10% chance of rain, so we have high hopes that these cloudy skies will leave us alone. We’re heading first downtown, the taking the river down to Genesee Valley Park where we meet up with the canal. Shouldn’t have any difficulty reaching Holley tonight, where we’ll make camp.

Emily says there’s only two things to worry about when packing for camping trips: warmth and rain gear. As we get ready to bike the canal for three days starting tomorrow, she organizes her clothes into neat piles and readies the Zip-lock bags.

Don’s Bike

After posting my story about our bicycle camping adventure, I was contacted by Don Lubach from s24o.com, a site dedicated to the Sub-24-Hour Overnight bicycle excursion. Head on over there and check out Doug’s site, and tell him that RocBike sent you.

We had our first bike camping adventure this weekend, and it was great!

We decided to start easy, with a family camping event at Five Rivers Environmental Education Center in nearby Delmar, New York. Here’s a bit of history about Five Rivers, which started out as a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp in the New Deal era:

Five Rivers is a place where conservation began, and today the Environmental Education Center proudly carries forward this long legacy of environmental stewardship. From 1933-36, a resident Civilian Conservation Corps built brooder houses, dammed streams and fenced fields to create New York’s first and only State Experimental Game Farm. For 40 years, state biologists conducted a comprehensive and widely acclaimed study of the ruffed grouse, while raising a variety of game species for release.

Research biologists at the site’s Wildlife Resources Laboratory, established in 1941, field tested new techniques in wildlife management, many of which revolutionized the profession and put New York in the forefront of a growing national conservation movement. The technique of aging deer by dentition, the use of cannon-nets for live-trapping, and the abundance of mallards in the eastern flyway are all directly attributable to this early work on the grounds. Today, the careful visitor can spot many elements which recall the storied Game Farm era.

Five Rivers is 8 miles from our house. We rode the entire way on Delaware Ave, which is hilly, but not too bad. We’ve had a ton of rain this summer in Albany, and it rained on Thursday and early in the day on Friday. As we headed out on the road, we noticed rain clouds coming in. By the time we’d gone a couple miles, the clouds were really coming quickly:

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