Honeoye

Monday, September 27, 2010

Having already walked the undisputed “major” Finger Lakes, I was resolved to complete the full adventure, including each of the “minor” lakes. I had begun with Otisco, the man-made lake just west of Syracuse, so only four others remained.

These lakes are Honeoye, Canadice, Hemlock, and Conesus, the farthest westerly of the eleven lakes. As colder weather was threatening, I felt some pressure to finish before the chilly central New York fall turned to winter.

After driving ninety minutes to reach Sandy Bottom Park, I began to walk around Honeoye through an intermittent light rain. Dawn was at seven AM that morning, and I started south on Route 36—West Lake Road—again! Honeoye is a smaller lake, only four miles long, but is still an object of much discussion because of its name. “How do you pronounce it?” I asked a woman who was waiting with her children for their school bus. Phonetically, it sounds like hun ee oy.

However you say it, there was a problem with my route around the lake: no road comes close to the southern shore of Honeoye. I had to add another four miles to my southern path, turning north again on East Lake Road to return to the lake’s shore  four miles later toward Route 20A through the village of Honeoye.

I completed the nineteen-mile trip in five and a half hours with a comfortable high temperature of sixty degrees.

After a pizza lunch, I decided to make the most of the afternoon and drove on to Canadice Lake for a second lake walk.