Joined by 75 other like-minded warriors from Planet Spandex — visualize helmets, wrap-around sunglasses, skin-tight shorts, colorful jerseys, fingerless gloves and hard-to-walk-in shoes—my friend Dave and I are prepared to conquer space, Western New York style, by riding our bicycles from West Seneca to Letchworth Park and back. In cycling parlance, it’s a “century ride” — 100 miles in one day—and September, after a summer of biking, is the perfect time to do it.

In less than an hour, we’re in the country — released from Buffalo’s gravitational field — and we start to pass through places we never knew existed — Waldo’s Corners, Hermitage, Gainesville and Lamont. Goldenrod floods the fields, and while the corn’s not as high as the proverbial pachyderm’s pupil, it’s still taller than I am, ears angling up off the stalks like pegs on a hat rack.

On the road, the going’s slow enough to pick out the orange stripes on woolly caterpillars inching across the pavement — my wife says they’re harbingers of winter. And something that you can never do blurring by in a car at 55 mph — actually read historical markers like the one that says the first president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, was born in Wyoming County. He went West as a young man.