Clinton’s Ditch and ChatGPT

August 28, 2025 — Day 8

Rivers Crossing Campground, Savannah NY

This morning Paul was thinking about what the employee told him last night, Clinton or Clayton’s something or other and he couldn’t remember exactly what it was called. So he called on ChatGPT. (susan here: the new Google but not as accurate and I’ll never use it.)

I’ll try not to talk too much. But AI is all in the news these days. There are very good things and very bad things about AI. But what is good is that it make for a very good search engine, because you interact with it. You don’t type “Erie Canal History” into DuckDuckGo, but you can phrase complex queries, and then expand on it, drilling down to what you really care about. Paul’s initial prompt was: “I’m interested in the history of the Erie Canal. Particularly in the area near Tyre and Savannah, NY. The original tow path was called something like the Clayton or Clinton switch.”

The answer was Clinton’s Ditch, named after the then governor of New York who spearheaded building the canal. If you want to read the whole exchange, go to Erie Canal History. You can also go to Mules and the EZ Lift Grader and read about why mules were used to tow the barges and the role of the EZ-Lift grader we showed yesterday. It is fascinating stuff, both the history of the Canal and how the Paul worked with the AI to get new information. The AI even gave us some tour suggestions including Apple Maps links.

Now for the bad news. Generative AI is, well, pretty bad. We were going to do that tour it suggested. All three locations were incorrect. That’s to be expected with today’s AI because they’re not good. But, you can ask the AI to cite sources, go to the original web pages, and learn from there.

Before we went out the electrician showed up! Our site used to be a seasonal site so it had a traditional power meter. The electrician removed the meter, it passed his tests, we plugged it in, and it passed our tests! We have power! Lets go explore!

The ChatGPT is how we found ourselves on Trail 2 of the Montezuma Heritage Park, 160 acres of mowed grassy trails that back in the day were the tow paths for both the Original Erie Canal and later the Enlarged Erie Canal. (You also see the Seneca River which is also known as the Seneca Barge Canal.) So you see all 3 eras of the canal in one pretty small area. Oh, and the Montezuma Heritage Park told us that Trail 2 was closed. LOL. You can’t trust anything on the internet.

All of this was based on the coincidence of us being parked near that ancient EZ-Lift and the employee, talking to Paul about it. We had intended to go birding for 5 days. But history is afoot! (susan here: weirdly, coincidence is how we find a lot of interesting stuff to see when we’re on adventure. That Route 66 museum we went to was the result of just noodling around the area and it was a worthwhile visit.)

This is a towpath for the Enlarged Erie Canal. Boats were towed by mule teams.

Here’s Paul standing in the Enlarged Erie Canal. 70×7 was the prism, 70 feet wide, 7 feet deep. It is called a prism because of the sloping sides. You can easily see the sloping sides in this photo.

You can see the columns on the left side of the viaduct.

But the right side had 31 arches spanning 840 feet across the Seneca River.

The intrepid explorers.

Next we headed off to Lock 62, part of Clinton’s Ditch, the Original Eric Canal, whose prism was 40 x 4.

You can see it is much smaller. This is the same “ditch” that’s right behind our RV in the campground. 

Lock 62 served as a guard lock into the river and a traditional step lock. Trail #3 follows the path where the boats passed through the river called “slack water navigation” with teams crossing on a 1440-foot long wooden bridge, on both the Seneca and Clyde Rivers before reentering the canal at Lock 64 or what was called Mud Lock.

Adventure was done, we needed ice since the foul tasting water would be fouling our ice maker. (Yeah, we really rough it.) And Paul absolutely needed some AA batteries for Frank Zapper, who as of this typing has yet to make his first kill. We always have flies in the RV, but I guess they heard about Frank.

We’re driving down a side road in the town of Montezuma and come across this quaint path, which was Montezuma Heritage Park.

We stopped, looked around, and headed back to the jeep, turned once more and saw the boat! How did we miss that?

We both thought that it was odd the mule was riding the boat, not towing it.

Oh, speaking of mules, a single mule could tow 30 tons of cargo at 2-3 mph. That’s why they built the canal. And that fact comes directly from ChatGPT, hopefully one of our readers will look into it and see if it is true.

It is always sad to see the falling down barns, but times change, we guess.

We got the ice and batteries, forgot the instant rice, which was important since we forgot the rice cooker and a few other things (susan here: isn’t that always the way? You have a list and you come out with more than the list!). Paul tried to make rice in the instant pot. It wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t rice cooker good. He started to defrost the Slow Cooker Hoisin Garlic Chicken he made & frozen a week ago. Every so often the lights would dim and the microwave would turn off. Weird. He would start it up again and it would happen after a minute. Very weird. Then he had a look at our battery meter & it was 93%!!! What? We’re plugged into a power pole it should be 99.9% or even 100%. The circuit breaker on the RV power pedestal was not tripped but we weren’t getting power. The rest of the campground seems to have power. We’ll run off batteries until we talk to them in the morning. We can live off of batteries for awhile unless we need the washer and dryer or the air conditioners. Weather looks good and laundry is mostly done. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

(susan here: with the bad water and iffy power at this site I’ll be pushing for a partial refund EVEN THOUGH the hosts are really sweet people. I’m sure this isn’t the first time this summer that power pole has caused issues and it feels kind of shady that they’re advertising it as a 30 amp full hook up site when it’s 30 amp for part of the day. We’re not in the Soviet Union under Perestroika where things were rationed. We’ve heard generators going off for short periods of time tonight. If we have to we will.)