Waterford Visitors Center, Waterford NY

(Wed Aug 3 - Dist: 23.9 mi; Locks: 1; TTT: 3:35 hrs)

Twas a beautiful calm morning as we left Coeyman's Landing and continued up river past the Capital of NY, Albany.  The port was quite busy with both barges and ocean going ships.  It was quite industrial looking south of the city but it did have some interesting city scapes from the water.

At Troy there is a federal lock on the Hudson River and then shortly there after one has to take either the Erie Canal or the Champlain Canal.  We of course turned left and headed west but only a few hundred yards to the Waterford Visitors Center.

The Visitors Center provides free docking for 2 nights so we took advantage and explored  the town.  The first lock of the Erie Canal is called E-2 and was right in front of our boat while docked here.  We wanted to know more about the area so took the 2 mile trek to the museum.  This area has much, much history and was in fact habited by the Mochican Indians long before anyone arrived from Europe.

The White House Museum

While in town we re-provisioned and had an opportunity to send all of the charts that we had borrowed for the trip up the coast back to their owners.  Of course we checked out a couple of the restaurants, no "best evers" here but decent none the less.  If one feels inclined you can rent a canal boat to do the trip.  Looks kinda small and slow.  Believe it or not there was a couple from this area that completed the Loop in a similar boat named Dragon Fly.