This place was a "bonus" place that I decided to go to after noticing the night before that the Erie Canal ran through it AND they have a place called Erie Canal Discovery Center (which was closed when I was in town but I heard in Syracuse -- their Erie Canal Museum -- that the Lockport Museum is much better than the one in Syracuse).

While I was looking at the canal I imagined the manual labor needed to dig it and build it back in the day.Then I also imagined that once it was open, the horse walking the adjacent path and pulling the boat along the canal. High tech for its day.

For a town with a population of around 20,000, it seemed very large. I was really surprised to see city buses normally associated with large metro areas but there were buses from Buffalo running through town. Buffalo is about 20 miles to the southwest of Lockport.

Also, there were dozens and dozens of school buses running around. Often I saw groups of 4 - 5 running together down the highways. And, they were all over in town as well.

DOUBLE BONUS: Since I had extra time at the end of the trip (thanks to so many places being closed), while on my way back to Buffalo (to fly home), I decided to stop in Lockport (just a half hour from the Buffalo airport) to tour this museum. Sooooo glad I did. I was the only one in there, and, the day I was there was the first time they had opened up their rennovated film with the "demo" after it. It was a very cleverly done film while you stood on a replica of a canal boat and the big screen on one side of you was the actors doing their duties as the people who got the boat through the five-step canal.

Here are some things I learned from the Discovery Center: -- the history of why the canal was needed and how it was constructed -- the earlier failed attempts to get a water route from Lake Erie to the HUdson River then on to the port of New York City -- the construction challenges they faced along the 382 mile canal -- how they basically had to learn by doing at constructing a canal -- no one in the U.S. knew how -- they invented their own tools for handling the construction, all they had was explosive powder and shovels and sledge hammer -- the ingenious idea to build the five-step set of locks to get the boats up to the level needed to get past the Niagara Falls area, it was done in Lockport -- the total cost of the canal project, in today's dollars, was $4 billion. But the canal paid for itself in ten years due to tolls and the savings to the shippers