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Watkins Glen NY – Hammondsport NY – Southeast MA
Sat May 3, 2025

We couldn’t get out of this hotel fast enough on Saturday morning, after another uncomfortable night spent in that terrible bed. The rainy weather had finally moved in, with steady sprinkles coming down, so we were especially glad we’d chosen to leave a day early, despite having paid for the room through tomorrow.

I’d found a breakfast place open fairly early down the road in Montour Falls, called the Blue Ribbon Diner. The place was a bit run down, the service indifferent, and the food nothing to write home about, but at least there was coffee. 🍵 This would serve as our primary sustenance for the day.

After the meal, we headed back north on 14. Before leaving Watkins Glen, I didn’t want to miss out on driving at least once around the old road race course. The course is mostly all quiet public roads now and forms a curvy 6.6 mile circuit around the gorge parklands, and through the village itself. There are named curves and other landmarks along the way that you can pick out using online maps as you cruise along. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but they are really just regular roads with some nice curves. Definitely would’ve been a bit more fun on two wheels, but still pretty cool to drive it after reading up on a bit of the history last night and thinking of my father-in-law racing along here, back in the day.

Finally leaving the Glen in our rearview, we picked up CR-23 again, again headed west over to Hammondsport. Our last activity in the area would be checking out the Glen Curtiss Museum there, where I’d stopped for a grand total of about five minutes on the 2021 Iron Butt Rally, to get a photo of Curtiss’ record-setting V8 motorcycle that’s on display. I’d made an even quicker stop for a photo of the big C-21 plane sitting out front for the 2024 LDX Rally. I’d known since that first visit that this was a place I’d have to come back to check out more thoroughly.

Today was that day. There was some sort of local trade event or swap meet being held on the premises, with some popup tents and trucks indicating a gathering of some hearty folk, despite the rainy weather. We headed inside and paid our full-price admission after clarifying that we were not there for the event, just to enjoy the one-level museum. We ended up staying for three hours.

Learning about the life, work, and inventions of this hometown pioneer of motor technology and aviation was nothing short of awe-inspiring. I hadn’t even heard of Glen Curtiss before that 2021 rally, when a friend with more aviation knowledge than I pointed out that the glider plan shown in the IBR logo that year was a Curtiss model rather than something related to the Wright Brothers, as many of us had assumed.

Curtiss was born here in Hammondsport in 1878 and began his professional career as a bicycle messenger, then builder, and eventual shop owner. He was an accomplished cyclist, winning many local races. After a few manufacturers began adding motors to bicycle frames, creating the first motorcycles, Curtis followed suit, immersing himself in the internal combustion engine design and eventually becoming the foremost ICE designer in the US of his time. He is credited with designing and building the first American V-twin motorcycle engine.

He was always innovating and Curtiss motorcycles were highly regarded, winning many races in the first decade of the 1900s. Obsessed with speed, Curtiss eventually designed an eight-cylinder motorcycle prototype, with which he himself set the land-speed record of 136mph in 1907, becoming “the fastest man on Earth” for the next few years. This was the bike we IBR riders had been tasked with photographing a few years ago.

As manned flight came into wider popularity, he began fulfilling engine orders for flying dirigibles, beginning the shift of his professional interests into the newly formed aviation industry and community. After the Wright Brothers announced their successful manned “flying machine” flight in 1903, Curtiss offered to provide engine design for them, on a couple occasions, an offer which was declined by the secretive Wrights, who were intent on insulating their patents.

So Curtiss started building his own gliders and then planes, despite what would be a decades-long series of patent lawsuits from the Wrights, who believed they were entitled to sole sovereignty over all variations of their original designs. While they had managed the first manned airplane flight, it had been done privately away from the press and public. In 1908, Curtis put his mettle and design skills unabashedly in front of the public world with a successful flight of his “June Bug” to win a contest for flying a distance over 5000 feet.

The museum is amazing and contains hundreds of real prototypes, production models, and replicas of vehicles designed by Curtiss as well as some of his contemporaries. He was a friend and colleague of inventor Alexander Graham Bell, both members of an aviation club that was intent on pushing the limits of aviation technology. They performed several historic experiments up in Baddeck, Nova Scotia where Bell lived, which was a neat tie-in for us, hearkening back to our trip to that town a couple years ago. We’d missed the opportunity to visit the Bell museum during that trip, but now feel we must definitely check it out next time we’re up there, to close the loop on this interesting story of friendship and innovation.

When World War I began, apparently the US government was able to force some degree of reconciliation between Curtiss and the Wrights, to facilitate manufacture of plans for the country’s war efforts. From then on, the War Department became Curtiss’ biggest customer and many of the earliest Air Force and Navy planes for the next couple decades were Curtis-designed models. It was very cool to see many of these ideas and innovations right there in person.

Beyond the genius innovation of Glen Curtiss, the museum also has some inventions, vehicles, and exhibits from other early machine manufacturers. They were pretty cool to see, but by the time we’d made our 3-hour circuit around the museum (with me reading most of the little signs and plaques in fascination), we were pretty tired and over-museum’ed. I’ve included more photos of our museum visit in the gallery link for this trip at the end of this post.

We left Hammondsport around 13:00. Remembering how uncomfortable the bumpy seamed surface of I-88 had been on our trip out here, we decided to take the northerly route home. Following NY 54 up the eastern side of Keuka Lake, through Penn Yan again and then Geneva, we hit I-90 for the long slog east. Not much else to say about the car ride home, and we made it back within the estimated six hours.

Despite having made this trip with two wheels more than I usually prefer, overall we felt like it had turned out to be a good choice, given the trip’s work requirements and circumstances. The weather hadn’t been as rainy as expected, but it certainly wasn’t perfect weather for cruising back roads. We enjoyed having more time to spend hiking around with proper footwear and enjoying the off-bike attractions of the Finger Lakes region, without feeling guilty that we weren’t “out riding”. At the same, time, the countryside out there is beautiful. Now that we’ve explored several of the bigger sights and attractions in depth, we fully intend to explore more of those great roads on the motorcycle on a future trip.

Here’s the gallery link to several more photos of the beautiful/interesting sights we experienced throughout the trip.