Day 2 - Erie Canal

Today we awoke to beautiful blue skies and cool temperatures!  LOVELY!!!  Today we ventured out to the Erie Canal Boat Tour. 

It was a great trip – though Drew didn’t think too highly of being stuck on a boat for 2 hours.  Truth is he didn’t get a nap and I really thought he would sleep on the boat – but he decided that he wasn’t going to cooperate!

You go through the locks and see first-hand how the canal works.  I thought it was quite fascinating!

After the boat tour we walked around the locks to see it how it all worked from atop of the bridge.  It was really neat to see how the water from one side rose and the other side fell – making the water level even on each side of the lock. The first picture below is of a boat in the upper lock – the water is receding.  The lower picture is the lock on the other side of the door – the water is rising. The above picture is the water level on both sides so the boat can continue traveling down the river.  The other fascinating aspect of it was that it all works by gravity. 

The levels of the four locks.

After seeing the locks, we walked around the town of Lockport and visited a church with 12 Tiffany stained glass windows – absolutely beautiful!  They are reported to be worth more than 12 million dollars! 

The windows start at the bottom like the first picture above and go up past the balcony as one long window.  The balcony was built a number of years later after the stain glass was installed.  They had an audio tour of the windows and the kids found it amazing how the different textures were created.  Andy liked the fact that the church had Lexan on the outside of the stain glass just like our church has!

We ended the day with ice cream sundaes!! It was a great day!