East Bound and Down, Loaded Up and Trucking, Vol 3

Ol' Smokey's got them ears on he's hot on your trail

He ain't gonna rest till you're in jail

So you got to dodge 'im and you got to duck 'im

You got to keep that diesel truckin'

Just put that hammer down and give it hell

This time, dear reader, you get a two-fer-one special.  Last two days of the migration in one blog post.  Mainly because there isn't a whole lot to tell about 3/4 of the third day.  :)  I could delineate the exact cost that the State of New York exacted in tolls for the privilege of driving over three hours on their freeways, but this blog is already boring enough, and you might be eating while reading this.

Two lovebirds (agapornis) spotted on the shore
of Hinckley Resevoir

We left the not-so-freeway near Verona, NY, and headed up through the Adirondack Mountains towards Plattsburgh, on the east coast of Lake Champlain.  We drove through beauty, and could tell we were closer to our summer home in Maine:  verdant mountain forests, lakes surprising you around a sudden curve in the road, and small towns dotted here and there with interesting features.

The as-the-crow-flies distance was less today, allowing for the occasional pullover at a lake or short trail headed down to a river.  Allison is especially susceptible to the call of a short (sometimes) trail.

The mountain river here was beautiful, but we had no bug spray handy, so we did not tarry long!

As we neared Plattsburgh, NY, I had a one-on-one with TripAdvisor.com, looking for an affordable place to eat with good reviews...that lead us to Bazzano's Pizza, about which the locals raved.  And yea verily, we partook of the Pizza and the Stromboli and the Calzone, and it was Indeed Good.  And the Calzone was mammoth in size for the price.  Amen.

About to do some serious damage to Italian food

For the first three days of our trip, most of the US was under a blanket of unusually warm weather, and when it turned out that the A/C was wonky in both rooms of our suite, it was looking like a miserably warm night... and here we were, only 52 miles or so from the Canadian border!  (Many signs in Plattsburg are bilingual, but unlike at home, ç'est le française!)  Fortunately, the identical suite across the hall was unoccupied, and the very helpful staff green-lighted our transfer.  And three teenage boys were tasked with hauling everything across the hall.  (See, they can be useful sometimes!)   We probably looked like one of those hallway bits from Scooby Doo.

Then it came.. the last day of the trip.  This was the morning we reserved for ourselves, to do something fun, in a part of the country that we had never seen before.  The morning started out with a short ferry ride on Lake Champlain...and I mean short.   14 minutes.  But we crossed the imaginary dotted line into Vermont while afloat, and were deposited on Grand Isle in the middle of Lake Champlain.  That's why it was a 14-minute ferry ride.  This is a big island in proportion to the lake.  

We went to visit an orchard in South Hero, at the (can you guess it?) southern end of the island, and we bought apple cider donuts and looked wistfully at the apple groves where we could not pick apples because it was to early in the summer.

Not quite ready to eat

A hop, skip and a jump over the bridge to the Vermont mainland, and it was on to Burlington, where we visited a chocolatier store for the SOLE PURPOSE of going to the bathroom.  (Ok, that might not have been the only reason.)  After being served coffees by the nicest barista I have ever met, we drove around Burlington to look at the waterfront and the central market area.  Unfortunately, there was not time to linger, but we have definitely added Burlington to our list of return sites someday.

From Burlington, we headed to Waterbury, VT, and since lunchtime was approaching, we needed a vector to some good food.  Logan wanted to do the searching this time... he fancies himself a connoisseur of food.  Based on the parameters he was given, he chose the Park Row Cafe.  As soon as we walked inside, we knew we had a winner, due to the long line of locals waiting to order their lunch.  We took ours to go and sat in the town park right across the street.  It was a lovely way to eat a good burger and fries.  Logan did us proud.

Then it was off to the place that put Waterbury on the national scene... the Ben & Jerry's ice cream factory.  We paid the coin for the tour, and got to watch as they made several hundred pints of Cherry Garcia.   Out of the 240,000 pints they would make that very day.  That's a lot of ice cream.  It was amazing seeing the size of the plastic bins with cherries in them, and the large boxes of chocolate chunks.  I can't show you any pictures because they were verboten during the tour.

After we got our free samples from the previous day's run (Americone Dream), we headed up to the "Flavor Graveyard", a fun little spot where B&J memorialized some of their flavors that flopped, or at least got retired for one reason or the other.   Each flavor was marked with headstone, with a cute poem bemoaning the demise of a flavor.

And then it was time... the last leg, with no further tourist stops.  We headed up through the Green Mountains, crossed into New Hampshire, and went north around and into the White Mountains.  With Mount Washington serving as our guide, we traversed the Crawford Notch and headed down into North Conway, NH...our first time ever that we approached camp from the north!  We pulled over at a scenic outlook, and let Matthew take the wheel for his first drive into camp.  I sat in one of the middle seats, and thus could safely capture the exact moment we crossed into Maine:

We passed through the totem poles and into our summer home.  Over 1900 miles in less than four days, and not a single stop by Smokey Bear.

We did what they said could not be done!

Categories: camp, Maine, summer