It’s another ninety-degree plus day. Recently, Colyn told me that Vermont averages about two ninety-degree days each year, that is, as of about fifteen years ago. We’ve already had eleven this year; and today is another scorcher. To relieve the heat, Miss Teddie took her last summer dip in Lake Champlain this morning while we took our daily walk on the Colchester, Vermont causeway. It was gorgeous on the trail this morning. We generally do a six-mile walk. She knows the turn around so well that she holds up about 100 feet from the mile marker and waits in the shade until I turn on my heels and start back. Occasionally, someone will yell to me – “Hey, you are leaving your dog behind . . .” I tell them she will not walk one step further than she must . . . as soon as I start back she, literally, jumps for joy, and quite often she will grab a stick and start trotting home. I have to yell out to get her to slow up.The causeway was built by the federal government during World War II. They built it as a rail line to take military supplies, and other essential provisions, by train to our troops overseas. The line traveled through Grand Isle, also known as South Hero Island, up into New York, terminating in the north eastern Canadian provinces and, finally, everything was loaded onto ships bound for Europe. The base is made from huge pieces of Vermont marble and granite quarried in Montpelier. They built the railroad right up the water’s edge and dumped the fill, laid some track, and went back for more fill. Quite an engineering feat. During the 1970s, some people put some money together and converted it into a multi-use path, pedestrians and bicyclists, no motorized vehicles, breaking the rail line just before the island, to allow boats to continue to sail onto the big Lake. The causeway is quite a tourist attraction. There’s a bike ferry that will take you from the Colchester side of the causeway over to the island. It runs from Memorial Day through Labor Day. Some people ride their bicycles all the way into New York and down that side of the lake to circumnavigate the outside border of Lake Champlain. Now, that is a chore.
Teddie and I are on our way to Canada as I write this; we’re about 15 miles away from the border. Tonight, we will stay in Belleville, Ontario. It is only three hundred miles, but the traffic from Montreal to Toronto, especially on Labor Day, can make it slow going. Should take us, give or take, six hours.
Hard to believe that Teddie and I are finally on the road. John Steinbeck said, in ‘Travels with Charley’, that he spent so much time planning his trip that he didn’t believe he would ever leave. I know exactly what he means. I started planning this trip over a year ago.
I love the Canadians. They are so polite. It runs completely at odds with the way they drive. They drive like New Yorkers. Crazy dangerous. Just got to the hotel at 6:30pm – traffic sucked, several accidents, and the resulting slow downs, really dented our time estimate. We left home at 11:30am, only making a couple of pit stops to get Teddie out and allow her to stretch her legs. Tomorrow, we stay in Sarnia, Ontario, just shy of the bridge to Michigan. Hope things go a little more quickly – but we must travel through Toronto and Windsor. Probably going to be about the same.
