This Scary Drive Near Rochester Takes You Under the Erie Canal

If you're looking for some cheap thrills, right here in New York state, we've got a cool (or creepy) day trip idea for you, only a 2-1/2 hour drive from Utica.

It's a special tunnel in the Orleans County town of Medina, which is part of the Rochester Statistical Metro Area. If you have claustrophobia, this might not be the experience for you. Because this tunnel takes you underneath the Erie Canal, and it's a lot smaller than normal.

Commonly referred to as the Culvert Road or the Median Culvert, according to an article in OnlyInYourState.com, it has a tendency to get kind of damp, it has a clearance of only 7-foot-6, and it was built in 1823. It's not possible the structure could be crumbling a bit after about 200 hundred years, right?

William Tilton has some fantastic drone footage on his YouTube post:

The tunnel is such an oddity, it's listed in Ripley's Believe it Or Not. And it's one of two sites in Medina to be listed in Ripley's. Pretty unusual for a town with a population of only 6,000. The other curiosty there is a church that's billed as "The Church in the Middle of the Road."

You can see, in the following aerial shot from Google Earth, how St. John's is smack-dab in the middle of Church Street, which seems to wrap around the building.

So, there's a couple of good reasons to take a road trip to Medina, which is about a 2-1/2 hour drive from the Utica area.