Tuesday, August 18: Short day today, cruising through the beautiful Adirondack Recreational area with all the ponds and lakes, forests and rivers. Really lovely.
2 hours in, we got to ride the Cumberland Head/Grand Isle Ferry from near Plattsburg NY to South Hero on Grand Isle, VT, across half of Lake Champlain. It was a 14 minute $25.75 crossing and quite nice today at 11AM.
Conducted another (abbreviated) Roomba tour on the ferry, to someone who has an RV but who’s looked at the R-pods and T@Bs for the smaller, lighter trailers. Grand Isle is truly an island, so we crossed it on VT 314 and 2, then took a bridge to cross the rest of the Lake.
I really love Vermont. Every time I’ve been, I’ve been enchanted with the small villages, the beautiful terrain, and the friendly folks. Besides, they have turtle crossing signs. It’s a great place.
Passed an entrance to the Cabot Creamery along the way and Jack and I almost turned down the road to explore. But remembered Roomba (who, by the way, is pulling so beautifully that we nearly forget he’s there), and decided to pass this time. Maybe next time, because Cabot Creamery is one of our fave places from whom to get our cheeses.
We arrived at Sugar Ridge Campground around 2PM (there’s no easy, direct route to get through VT horizontally, although a couple of big interstates heading N/S) and it’s quite a pretty and well-kept private camping area. Although we did not take advantage, there is an access trail to a Rails to Trails conversion ride that we need to put on our “to do” list.
Downside: you have to buy any wi-fi you want to use. Upside: great cell service, which we’ve already paid for.
There are lots of folks who live here — at least during the summers — as you can see their sites are permanent. This place is a destination that many folks would sign up for, and stay a week or more — there are two pools, and lots of recreation areas for families and kids (basketball, volleyball, playgrounds, a “bouncy house,” hiking trails, and more). Happily, we’re off the beaten track a bit and have a nice site with good privacy and a shower house quite nearby.
I haven’t spoken much so far about our meals — often a major highlight of our camping trips. Well, so far, we’ve elected to go the “cold dinner” route — and it’s been quite good, frankly. Every day, in a town nearby right before we head into camp, we stop at a grocery store and get food supplies. As it turns out, nearly every night so far, we’ve had chicken salad in various incarnations and with various go-withs.
They’ve been really quite good, on a bed of lettuce, with different crackers and/or spices/sauces to complement them. Bonus: we use the leftovers for making sandwiches to eat during the drive the next day.
But we exhausted our stores at our late arrival yesterday, and, knowing we’d have a short drive (relatively speaking) today, didn’t make sandwiches. So we stopped at a cute little family-run easy-stop cum gas station cum deli/pizza place today and had a pair of “chicken burgers” for lunch. Jack’s was “cordon bleu” style and mine had bacon and cheddar on top. Bag of chips and a couple of cold drinks, plus a good picnic table, and Jack commented we might be close to turning into chickens — not a welcome prospect in my mind, unless I was the chicken wrangler.
Still, after that stop we felt the grocery-like places at which we might be able to buy our dinner, might not easily accommodate a hitched trailer, so we passed many options along the way, and suddenly, we were at the Sugar Ridge Campground. So we unpacked the bikes and rode out no more than a mile or three to a “market” that was a cross between Meadows of Dan Market and a pretty high-end Kroger store.
We found some fresh ravioli stuffed with spinach and ricotta, some “pesto” made with cashews and arugula, shaved parmesan cheese, a crusty loaf of bread (we picked up some crushed garlic to make garlic bread), and we had a wonderful repast. I also carried a bottle of nice red wine in my pannier back up a significant hill to our “home.”
Most stops on this trip, we have not been too interested in taking a great deal of time or effort on the meal front due to the one night stand effect. But today we got a bike ride in, and even did some laundry before dinner, and all was right with the world. First hot dinner we’d had in days and it was fun to fix and even more fun to eat.
Life is good.
peregrinations 