Scotland, Disorientation

"Venezuela 70" is a strange beast.  It's an album-length sampling of so-called cosmic music, a mix of jazz fusion and chirpy, bellowing, primitive early synthesizers.  The movement had about 15 minutes of fame in Venezuela, and almost no airplay outside their home country.  But I trust the boutique record label Soul Jazz, and so I purchased it in August.  I played it about 4 times and gave up - it was impenetrable.

Then I went to Scotland.  As we rushed past the slate-grey countryside on the train from Edinburgh to Inverness, I popped it in one more time.  Not only did Venezuela 70 make perfect sense, I fell in love with it.  

WTF?  Scotland is as far away from Venezuela in every sense of the word.  Before we left, I made a mix of modern Scottish music: Rod Stewart, Big Country, Average White Band, Mark Knopfler.  But when I got to the actual country of origin, it didn't seem to fit.  What did fit?

• "Love is a Hurtin Thing" by Gloria Ann Taylor.  
• "Jade Visions" by Bill Evans.  
• "Oh What a Beautiful City" by Reverend Gary Davis
• "Spring" by Vivaldi
• "Watch Out" by Dr. Blue 
• And Venezuela 70.

This is the not the first time it's happened to me while travelling.  When I first hit Memphis in 2007, I brought along a pretty wide mix of Memphis-bred music: Chuck Berry, Memphis Minnie, B.B. King.  But I ended up listening to the Charlatans UK, a band so entangled in 90's Britpop and dance music that they'd never fill the smallest bar on Beale Street.   To this day, I cannot listen to them without thinking of Memphis (and I do often!)

There's this great book This is Your Brain on Music that describes the tight relationship between memory and songs.  Perhaps a new landscape disrupts the brain so badly that the memory adheres to the closest tune.  You can no longer separate the two.

Driving on the Left

When we got off the train to Inverness, I admitted to Amy, "I'm kinda apprehensive about driving." Sometimes apprehension is spot on.

I have never, ever, EVER been as disoriented as I was driving in Scotland.  Having driven for 35 years, it has been driven so far into my "muscle memory" that it was almost impossible to unlearn.  Just a few tidbits:

• Left turns are easy.  Right turns are hard and require attention.
• The rear view mirror is to your left
• Cars come at you on the right.  You can't help but swerve a little (in some random direction)
• When you make a right turn and go across the opposite lane, you make a quick glance to your right, even though no car would ever being going that way.  The cars in the opposite lane always come toward you.

Then add the peculiarities of Scotland:

• There is no shoulder.  Anywhere.
• The lane is not wide enough to hold your car .. or at least it seems so
• There's a garbage truck on your ass.  Blinking his lights.
• The double-lane road turns into a single lane with passing places.  And just ahead of the passing place is a curve, so you have a split second to avoid a collision.
• What the ????  There's a SHEEP in the road ?????  A whole friggin' herd!

So here I was, responsible for two lives in the car, plus the lives of a garbage truck driver and a herd of sheep.  Was I terrified?  Let's just say, it required a crowbar to get my hands off the steering wheel.  

Thanks for the reminder, guys!  And yes, this is a stock photo.  Amy was too busy praying to take pictures.

So If It Was So Disorienting,  Would You Ever Go Back Again?

Give me ten minutes and my bags are packed, kemo sabee!  Because here's the thing about being human - you don't need to be oriented all the time.  If the natives are friendly, if your jacket is waterproof, and you got some sort of granola bar in your pocket, you'll do fine.  Stressors are good for the growth of any biological being.   

Cheap whisky doesn't hurt either!   

Scotland, Vittles and The Water of Life

In Johnny Foxes, a pub near the river in the central town of Inverness, a chalkboard on the wall says:

• Soup of the Day, £5.00
• Dram 15 yr old Dalwhinnie, £4.50

Now this country has its priorities straight!  To put this in perspective, at the time we were there, £1.00 is $1.30.  That makes a dram of Dalwhinnie about $5.85.  In the states, at the bar it will go for $15, and an entire bottle for around $75.

But like I said, the Scots are imminently practical.  The development of Single Malt Whisky (don't call it Scotch!  We don't call bourbon American now, do we?) was a matter of survival.  When you mostly live on meat, and that meat has been hanging around awhile, it gets sorta ... well, pungent.  And the critters are eating more of it than you are.  The Scots found this fantastic substance kills 99.9% of these critters when poured on meat.  Hence it's called The Water of Life.  

But like other things Scottish, they were not content to leave it just at a practical level.  They spun it into an art.  At the Scotch Whiskey Experience in Edinburgh, we learned how arty this can be.  The four Whisky-producing regions of Scotland each bring a different flavor.  My favorite is the Islay region that produces smoky, peaty whisky that's almost clear in color.    Below is their collection of whiskies going back 100 years or more.  

In some cases, even though the stopper is still on the bottle, all the whisky in it has evaporated.  They call that portion the Angels Share and ... well, I hope they're happy. 

Breakfast

The Scots have a love-hate relationship with the English, as you might have guessed.  Like the Irish, they borrow the notion of the Full English Breakfast and tinker with it.  The Scottish breakfast is:

• Eggs
• Tom-ah-toes, small and poached until the skin just slides off
• Bacon
• Haggis or Bangers
• Baked Beans.  And I can't stress this enough - they must be canned Heinz beans of the lowest, blandest quality. 
• Toast - white or brown (there is no such thing as wheat toast.  All toast is wheat, muh friend!  Do you want white wheat or brown wheat)

Meh.  I'm not a fan.  It helps to smoosh everything onto your fork before shovelling into your gullet.  Remember as kids how we used to religiously keep food from touching each other?  That won't work in Scotland.  And you wouldn't want it to.  

Alternatively you can get a bowl of porridge.  I opted for that most days.  The Scots, like all Brits, are fond of their Runny Honey, and use that as their sole porridge topping.  I added lemon marmalade because ... well, it's my vacation!  

Porridge is just oatmeal that's been mashed and pulverized beyond recognition.  This is a very British cooking technique, the equivalent of sauce-making in France.  Mushy Peas are the greatest expression of this.  But even the bangers have a very finely ground meat in them that is so unlike the coarse grind of American sausages.  Bleh.  

Which brings me to Haggis.  The less said on this subject the better.  Suffice it to say, I ate it once accidentally.  Amy got Venison for dinner and pushed over a deep fat fried ball over to me.  "Try that." she ordered.  It was black inside, cinammony, and well, nondescript.  That was enough for me.  When in Rome, do as the Romans and all that.  But if the Romans are all jumping off a bridge (or eating something yucky), I won't follow.  Sorry.   

Dinner

On the other hand if someone offers you Cullen Skink, say yes, yes, OMIGOD yes!   

Cullen Skink is potato and onion chowder with chunks of smoked haddock.   As you expect from the Scots, it comes from practicality - you preserve fish, abundant in the many coastal waters, the same way you do bacon ... with lots of smoke and salt.  Many of our dinners in Scotland riffed off that concept.  The best fish I had was Smoked Hake at a fish bistro called The Cafe Royale.  An Inverness, Restaurant 27 served smoked haddock in a cream sauce with Pappardelle pasta.  It was perfect with a dry Spanish red wine (yeah I know, it's supposed to be white wine with fish ... but smoked fish is different).  

The smoke nails it.  It gets into your veins, inoculating you against the chilly, windy evening.  It's the equivalent of porridge in the nighttime.  But really, there was no bad seafood in Scotland, no matter what it was.  We got an order of the hugest mussels we'd ever seen, each the size of two marbles, swimming in a nice Thai cream sauce.  And even the Fish and Chips were pretty spectacular, even if not served in authentic newspaper.  (And I like Mushy Peas - sorry!)

Amy went on a quest for the perfect dinner pie.  She had chicken and rosemary pie at Mum's Comfort Foods in Edinburgh, and Steak and Ale pie at Johnny Foxes.  My personal quest was for Bangers and Mash, and there Mum's Comfort Food nailed it with Chilpotle Cheese mash, caramelized onion gravy, and spicy sausages.  

For dessert?  Amy went for the fruit crisps, which were uniformly excellent.  Me, I was partial to Eton Mess and Sticky Toffee Pudding.  But for me, the quintessential Scottish dessert was Cranachan, a masterpiece of flavor:

The raspberries are marinated in whisky.  The cream is vanilla double cream.  On the bottom and bottom are toasted porridge flakes with honey.   In a way it's quite humble, the opposite of Italian or French desserts.  But it all turns on the quality of the raspberries, which were the best I'd ever tasted. 

I know, I know.  You don't think of Scotland for their cuisine.  But you should.  Because in many ways, it's the highest expression of local cuisine, which is so highly regarded these days.  They eat what's around them, and what they concoct helps them appreciate (and survive) the climate.  It takes more than a fad to do that properly - it takes hundreds of years.  

Scotland, The Landscape

Any description of Scotland boils down to two things:

• It's old
• It's weird

It's also very beautiful, but beauty is just an outgrowth of its oldness and weirdness.  

Amy and I spent 8 days in Scotland, but I'll walk you through it thematically rather than chronologically.  

You basically start with the poorest, rockiest terrain on Earth.  You can't even grow potatoes here, the soil is so bad.  And the weather - oy vay - is windy and rainy.  Eventually you get to something like this:

The natural state of Scotland is weatherbeaten, scrubish and barren, and it is not flat pretty much anywhere. The clouds rain down, and the water from them pours unabated down hillsides until it flows into some deep channel like Loch Ness.  

Every once in awhile, like the beautiful Glen Affric, you get a bog.  A bog is like a midget forest, where the trees and brush are the same ones that grow on hillsides, and grow for a long time, but they never make it past a certain very small height.  Eventually they die and become peat.  And a long time after that, they become Scotch!  But more on that later.

Unlike America, the grown-up trees here are very old - you can see the pretty-near-fossilized moss on them above.  But they're not big around like the redwoods.  And the colors are strange - it's not the universal green you might see in Ireland, but a palette of orange, yellow and purple mixed into the green.  It's similar to the colorful Adirondack autumn, but it never lets up.

My favorite movie is Local Hero, a 1983 movie with Burt Lancaster and Peter Reigert.  Central to the movie is this almost surrealistic pull that Scottish nature exerts on people.  It's not what you normally think of as majestic (like the Grand Canyon) or pristine (like the waters of the Caribbean).  But it sucks you in.

The Scots have learned to live within its parameters.  They're practical if nothing else.  So below is Edinburgh Castle, built nicely on the tallest hill of the city.  The natural cliffs are so steep that nothing is going to get up it, much less up the walls that seem to grow out of it.

This is actually our view from the Waldorf Astoria, where we got to spend a free night in Edinburgh.  In the morning I woke up at 5:30, and there was one lone room lit up in the Castle ... I imagine someone was there fixing porridge for themselves before the tourists arrive at 8 AM.

The castle was an endless source of jokes.  "Have fun storming the castle!" I'd quote from The Princess Bride every five minutes.  Or "there's the boiling oil bucket, also for French Fries."  We had respect for Edinburgh Castle, was it was just so big and bulky that it was too damn funny.

And the animals are weird too - case in point:

(Looks like he's auditioning for The Beatles or something.)  This guy inadvertently caused us much grief in U.S. Customs.   The tour guide let us off the bus and gave us some mixture to feed them from our hands.  No prob.  But then there was a question on the customs form "Did you touch or handle cattle while in the country?"  Amy answered yes, and that got us detained at the border, where we basically had to swear-on-the-bible we weren't bringing back Mad Cow Disease.  

Ah well.  There's a question on the Red Cross Blood Donation form, "Have you spent 5 years in the UK?"  Well nope, but now I want to.  More on food, driving on the left side of the road, and more later!

Honeymoon Quebec City

Quebec is the oldest US or Canadian walled city whose walls still exist.  Sad to say, they are no longer effective keeping the invaders out.  The streets are full of gawking, iphone-snapping non-Quebecois tourists ... I guess we were part of that contingent.

We spent the first day making fun of the Chateau Frontenac - bellowing "Frawnt-en-nawc" in our snootiest accent.  It'll set you back 500 Clams a night (500 US clams?  Canadian?  Does it matter?).  It's a big gawdy castle, and I'm sure it was drafty in there.  There are 600 rooms over 18 floors, and there's an ice cream place on the boardwalk next to it.  In other words, it's a place you brag about staying, without necessarily enjoying your stay there.

Walkin'

If there's a common theme to what vacation spots attract Amy and I, they are places you can walk in.  You don't need a car to go across 7 lanes of traffic to get ... well, across the street.  But some stair climbing might be involved - see left.  Part of the walled city is actually a giant hill.  Very convenient, if you're a wall builder.  You'll be building this wall down and - blammo - there's this giant cliff and you get the day off!

We stayed at a B&B in the neighborhood outside the walled city.  The only things missing are a big moose head and a six pack of Molson.  But dig those stone walls - they're actually from the 1700's!  The TV set is a bit newer.

Our host is a native Quebecois whose husband is from Morocco.  On both mornings, our breakfast table is bilingual, and there's almost no clues as to who will speak what.  There are couples from New Jersey, Toronto, Ottawa and close by ... the guy from New Jersey speaks very fluent French, but his wife none at all.  A few Quebecois speak both, and they switch between them.  I catch bits and pieces of the French portion.

But here's the thing.  When you try to jump in with survival-French, a bilingual will just switch to English.  I might not sure why - it may be for comfort, but it may also be a cliquey sort of "we are a closed club" and they don't want you to join.  (Parisians will speak to you in French patiently, even if yours is crummy.)  There is a strained, long history of Franco-English relations ... and it feels like I've stepped in a flaming bag of dog poo.

Speaking of dog poo, we spent a day with modern art.  OK, cheap shot.  The Musee National des Beaux Arts de Quebec had once been the home to ancient art masterpieces, which Montreal slowly pilched over the years.  Left with beautiful museum buildings (actually their former prisons, but whatever), Quebec filled them with 20th century modern art, which Amy and I both adore.  The ant sculpture to the left is a quote from one of the paintings, and the color is weird and wonderful.  They had a great exhibit of Paul a Quebec, the semi-autobiographical comic strip that's very richly emotional.  Our favorite artist was Jean Paul Lemieux, who in a certain sense, is the most classic of the modernists there.  His images are stark and there doesn't seem to be a lot of detail until you look really closely.  He is very fond of human beings, but he doesn't let them off the hook.

The third day, we visited the Museum of Civilization - very thoughtful, but all over the map.  There are native exhibits mixed with the history of Quebec.  The carriage exhibit was a real hoot.  You think that designers put a lot of thought into cars, but carriages were beautiful and sweeping in their own right, and will probably last longer.

Vegetables?

OK, if you're a vegetarian, you'll starve in Quebec.   It's survival of the fittest.  If you've got snow six months of the year, and an Elk is staring you down for that last potato ... you gotta do what you gotta do.   Still, a Canadian carnivore doesn't eat the volume of a meat as, say, a Texan.  It's respectable - more European.

We ate at Le Hobbit the first night.  No lembas here - the owner just named it that because Hobbits love food and drink.  Understandable.  I had duck duo - a nice filet on one side of the plate and confit encrusted in pistachios and deep-fat fried.  Oh so good!  Duck is not quite the dense delicacy it is in France, but it comes close.

The second night we ate at Restaurant La Guelle De Bois, which means "Hangover" in French.  The walls were filled with strangely cobbled-together art, and the menu was very small, "but everything is good," said our waiter.  Indeed!  We started with Elk Carpaccio mixed with radish coins in a mustard sauce.  Then a fresh yellow beet salad ... wait, we didn't order that.  But mmmm it tasted so good!  About 5 minutes later the waiter came out and said, "Ooops, that was for another table.  But enjoy!"  For the entree, Amy had duck and I had venison.  Lemme tell you - if the deer hanging out in our backyard could taste as good as my entree, I'd be out wrestling them to the ground.

Butchering the Language

So Amy had booked us his-and-her massages at a Spa in the walled city  Very cool.  I changed into my bathrobe and figured ... well, we had 15 minutes, so I decided to relax by the pool.  I figured Amy would come in.  But after while, no one had arrived.  I picked up my towel and to show off my French, I said to the pool attendant - "J'ai oubliee ma marie" - I lost my wife.  She laughed.

Two days later we were in the car going back to the Adirondacks.  Amy was practicing her French.  "Wow, this is interesting," she says.  "The word femme means both woman and wife, but the two words for man and husband are separate - l'homme and le mari."

"Oh crap," I said.  "I told the pool attendant 'I lost my husband.' "   Oh well.   I guess it was funny either way.  I reached into a bag of poutine Ruffles and thought "C'est la vie."

Honeymoon Montreal

My honeymoon started on World Contraception Day.  This was totally accidental.  :-)

It started like any other vacation ... with me guzzling cough syrup.   Why do I get colds right before I get a rest?  I dunno.  Maybe it's my body, racked with stress and a depleted immune system ... telling me I need a vacation?  How fortuitous!

Anyway, the honeymoon.  A rather modern invention.  Supposedly original its purpose was to visit family and friends who couldn't come to the wedding.  Then it was re-conceived (again, pardon the pun) as a time for working on the new relationship (again ... oh, whatever).

I don't know how young newlyweds do it.  You're expected to have more fun than is humanly possible, because when the children arrive, of course, it's all over.  And if you've never traveled far with your new spouse, who knows what'll happen?  Travelling can be a stressful business to begin with - you're in a strange land, far from your schedule, and the basics of life like where to eat are totally up in the air.  It gets to me, certainly, when Google Navigation is barking at me to get in the far left lane and it doesn't see the 5 lanes of SUV's between me and it.  I'm not at my best.

But, Amy and I have been around the block, and are perfect travelling buds.  We don't need to be at a certain place at a certain time.  We have options and not obligations.  We're not afraid to walk anywhere - in the cold, in the rain, up hills.   We laugh. We are each others reading glasses for the world around us.  There will be no pressure on this honeymoon.

We started off crossing the Canadian border at the 1000 Islands.  The signs congenially, accomodatingly spoke in French and English.  But when we got into Quebec, they changed to all French as if to say, "Enough.  Conform to our ways or starve!"

Amy's hectic schedule as a trainer around New York State netted her about six billion Hilton points this year, enough for the three nights at the Montreal Embassy Suites.  It's across the street from the Palais du Congress de Montreal, which I call the Charms Candy building, as you can see on the left.   They had a Sistine Chapel exhibition which makes you say, "Wait - isn't that in Rome or something?"  But here's the thing.  It's really hard to see stuff on the actual Sistine Chapel, so they hang big life-size blow ups of the pieces which you walk through.

Ehhh.  Sounds a little hokey.  We didn't buy it.

On the advice of a Montreal native, we dined at Brit and Chips.  We had a chicken pie, which unlike Banquet's rather crummy version, didn't leak gravy out all over the table.  I had always wondered how they ate these on picnics.  We had Cod with a burgundy batter, and OK that might be a little more high-falutin than the newspaper-wrapped originals, but they were pretty durn good.  But get this .... the chips were French Fries!  Who knew?  :-)  And they taste very good with just a little sprinking of malt vinegar.   OH and I almost forgot ... mushy peas.  Fantastic!  Anyone will attest to my hatred of unadorned green peas,  but all you have to do is soak them overnight and boil them with sugar and salt until they fall apart, and MMMM!

Quebec is a land that has never reconciled their French and English

counterparts.  Hence these two statues ... actually one statue called The English Pug and The French Poodle.  Montreal has a lots of really great statues, but these were my favorite.

The two parts are at opposite ends of National Bank Square near Notre Dame.  One, an Englishman, is looking to the left.  The other, a French dame, is looking to the right.  They are a block apart.  But their dogs, an English pug and a French Poodle respectively, look longingly at each other across the square.  It speaks volumes, and I think it's more poignant than a thoughtless "let's all join hands and be one" statue.

We spent most of Sunday in the Montreal Botanical Gardens, across from the Olympic Stadium.  It dwarves just about every arboretum we've seen, and just goes on for blocks and blocks.  We didn't hit every corner, but we got some good highlights.  The bonsai trees really blew me away.  As you probably know, bonsai's are not a species, but a way of growing a tree so that it stays a dwarf.  For example, the tree to the left is about a foot tall, but it's a real tree and it's over 100 years old.  Astounding!


There are two quintessential Montreal dishes: poutine (fries and cheese curds smothered in gravy) and smoked meat.  After walking the gardens, Amy had grilled steak and I had the classic smoked meat sandwich - piled high on very thin bread with yellow mustard.  It resembles corned beef or pastrami, but it's less garlicky than the New York counterpart.  In fact, you smell this kind of spice all around Montreal - sage and smoke intermingled.

Then we wandered back into the Botanical gardens - in September evenings they get lit up.  Above is the Chinese garden, obviously.  Once long ago, I mistakenly took codeine and NyQuil on the same evening, and my dreams looked a lot like that.

So I want to say something about Montreal.  It's large but extremely quiet - no car horns or sirens.  It's progressive in some things, especially bicycles which are all over the place.  But in other things it's quite retro, like smoking.  And try to find a vegetarian meal in this town ... you'll just starve, unless you can live on Tim Horton's donuts.  (Once upon a time, I could).  It's a port city, but the port section is the most elegant part.  It has a big mountain in the center, Mount Royale which the city is named after.  (The picture is taken from there).  Kids are yelling in French, which destroys the language's romanticism.    It's not as snooty as Paris, but it evokes that feeling.

Oh and one more thing ... their walk signals are weird. I mean look at that. No one walks upright like that - you always bend a little bit forward so as to cash in on the momentum. And what's his right arm doing? Reaching for something? If so, why not just lean into it? It is not an accurate depiction of how the natives stroll in Montreal.

On our last day, Amy and I saw an IMAX movie at the Montreal Science Center ... Montreal being the city where IMAX was invented. I had never seen one before. It was a bit in-my-face, but pretty cool.

Our last Montreal meal was at Jardin Nelson, which was cool because it was not really a building.  There was no roof  - only the facade of a building (which you can't tear down in Vieux Montreal for historical reasons) with little upside down umbrellas to keep the rain off.  Plants grew everywhere.  We had crepes - mine with duck, and Amy's with rabbit.  A jazz band played.  Very French indeed.  A nice way to cap off the whirlwind tour.

On to Quebec City next!

Maine/Vermont Day 9-10: Being Shifty

Monday started with a 7:30 Shifting Workshop.   The women who showed up didn't want a class on theory.  They wanted to know "When do I shift the left one and when do I shift the right one?  And which way?"  The answer boiled down to 1960's Laugh-In Philosophy - "If it feels good, do it."

At breakfast we discover that Mary and Pete, our tour guides, have complementary senses of humor.  (Every VBT tour guide has at least one sense of humor - it is standard equipment.)  Pete is more rehearsed and Vaudvillean, with a deep repertoire like Henny Youngman.  Mary is more ad-lib, like Jonathan Winters.  She will carefully observe how much teasing you're willing to take, then proceed up to that line.

We also discover the group overachiever, Rob from California.  There's always one in the group.  From the start he sticks out a little, and we can't figure out how ... And then we're passing this other bike touring company at the same inn called POMG, or Peace of Mind Guaranteed.  (Amy and I immediately start calling them OMFG behind their backs).  I look at the POMG bikers - all fit and trim and ready to do 100 miles in a day.  Then I look at the VBT tour and we're all ... uh, not like that except Rob.

Rob starts grilling Pete for ways to get more miles in.  Pete says, "You can go to Canada."  Rob says, "All righty!".   It's not as crazy as it sounds, the border being only 10 miles further than the Northernmost part of the day's route.  But it becomes the talk among the group - Rob's going to Canada!  That crazy biker dude!

So we all start off north for the Isle La Motte, the largest of the Champlain islands and the oldest European settlement in Vermont.  The ride is flat, but heading over the causeway from our own Hero Island we get slammed by gusts of wind.  It's not terribly cold, but it's brisk and we feel miles beneath us.  It's beginning to feel like a real bike ride.

We stop at the Fisk Quarry, which is an exposed portion of the oldest known coral reef in the world, the Chazyan Reef.  The actual reef started in what's now Zimbabwe about umpteen-million years ago, shifted up here, and then water drained off it.  It was an actual quarry until geologists discovered fossils in it (like the one on the right) and digging halted.  It's illegal to pull fossils out of the quarry, so when tourists find one, they usually mark it with a ring of stones around its perimeter.  We saw the ancient remains of sponges, fish, crabs, and VBT bikers.

As we headed out from the quarry we noticed Rob wasn't in our group anymore ... he did go off to Canada.  But he did get back in time for lunch.  The rest of us peddled into a really nasty headwind back to the inn.

We went Kayaking in the afternoon - my first time in a Kayak.  The lake was choppy and it rained a bit, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly.   Bill, our guide, taught us a little about kayaking and a lot about rum-running.  Because this part of Lake Champlain is so close to Canada (who never suffered prohibition), it was a prime trail for the then-illegal importation of alcohol to the States.  They had nice tricks, developed over the years from experimentation.  Boats filled with barrel liquor barrels would attempt to go down Lake Champlain and get caught.  So they learned to tie boxes of rock salt to the barrels.  If they were chased by the cops, they'd push the barrels and boxes overboard.  Two or so days later when the heat was off, the rock salt would naturally dissolve and the box would float to the top, acting like a buoy.  Then you just find the boxes, pull on the rope and hoist the barrel back into your boat.   Pretty ingenious, eh?

We got back in late afternoon, and I was feeling peppy.  Or maybe competitive ... Rob brought it out in me.  So by myself, I took a 17 mile tour loop the other side of the island. The ride out was into the headwind, and I rode down on my drops all the way.   There were a couple of nut-busting hills too.  But then coming back, a nice tailwind pushed me leisurely back home.  It reminded me of my early days of cycling, 7 years ago, when I desperately needed recharging every few days or so.  I came back to a dinner, which I felt I deserved after 49 miles - that being the main difference between a bike vacation and a regular one.

The next morning, it rained.  Wait - surely we can't be biking in the rain!  This was not in the brochure.  Yet everyone got on their bikes and headed out.  Surely this is evidence of a higher power, a power greater than ourselves , greater than our tour guides, and even greater than the inner voice that says "I spent $X on this vacation and I'm gonna damn well enjoy it!" We come around a bend, the exposed beach appears and a gust of wind pretty near blew us off our bikes.  But we continued on.   We knew a hot shower was coming eventually.

Fortunately, the rain stopped and it got toasty by the time we hit the Ed Weed Fish Culture Station.  Indeed the fish here were cultured - they had an opera house, a theater, a little bistro.  We just missed their big Oscar Wilde weekend.

We grabbed a snack here, and I developed a fondness for apples smeared with Vermont Natural Peanut Butter (Vermont is known for their peanuts ... ???)  Robs talks with "the Canadians" in our group, Maureen and Beverly, about this year's Tour de France.  Maureen and Beverly are retired, avid bicylists, and everyone wants to be like them.  Maureen said the first time she "re-learned" riding a bike a few years ago, she could only go 500 feet.  Now they're smoking all of us.

There are two routes to get from the Fish Culutre Station to our next stop, Snow Farm Vinyard, for lunch.  There's a local sculptor named Harry Barber who made expensive minature garden castles for some of the locals.  Each of the routes has some castles visible from the road.  I resolve to find all of them.  I go down down one route, then backtrack and go down the other.  I ask any locals I meet up with.  One person says, "What castles?"  Another says, "Yep, there are lots of castles around here.  Yep.  A lot of them.  Good luck!"  then walks away.  I end up finding three of them.  I feel like a failure, but then I remember it's my vacation and vacation failure is impossible.

In the afternoon we head for Burlington.  Amy calls ahead to book a massage.  The trip is interesting in that there are barely any highways involved - just walking/biking trails.  We were on South Hero Island and Burlington was on the mainland.  To get there, we biked along an old train route, not wide enough for a car.  After a few miles of park riding, we hit the Colchester causeway.  Built for the railroad in 1900, there's an 1/8th of a mile gap in the middle where a Bike Ferry takes you across (I tell Rob "You can jump that!")  From the other side, you bike along 4 miles of piled slate and granite There's some good countertops in there if you could only carry one on your bike!

Reaching the mainland, we pedal the legendary Burlington bikeway.  Though it goes through technically-residential neighborhoods, there are very few cross streets, and the scenery is just gorgeous.  The weather has warmed up a little and lots of people are biking with us.  It's just the thing to do around here, and it was beautiful.

But it was a long biking day, and we got downtown and hoofed it over for the spa.  There's only one massage slot open, though, and Amy has her heart set on it.  As she's getting kneaded and chopped, I read my book in the waiting room, still dressed in my bike clothes ... but not smelly.  I don't think.  It's hard to tell.

I book us the perfect dinner spot - the Revolution Kitchen.  All vegetarian, which is what you expect in Burlington.  Dinner begins with Roasted Brussel's Sprouts.  They're like the best thing I've ever eaten, and not just because I'm starving.  Amy had the Noodle Pot, a kind of Faux Pho (heh heh).  I had their Grilled Sweet Potato Tacos.  Fabuolous!  As good as the Moosewood, maybe a boutch more upscale.   We end the day with a Ben and Jerry's ice cream, just blocks away from the converted gas station where Ben and Jerry started it all.  The wind was blowing much warmer and hoofed back to our B&B tired but satisfied.

Maine/Vermont, Day 7-8: Onto Biking

At The Cupboard in New Harbor, Maine Amy and I split a freshly baked cinnamon roll and a freshly baked sticky bun.  Both were light and airy as souffle, with not too much icing or sugar.  The couple at the campground said they brought some back in their car, and the yeasty smell was in their car for days.  If they could put that in an air freshener...

We spent most of Saturday driving, returning to Carie and Randy's house in Woodstock Vermont for some downtime.  After the quintessential Yankee dinner of pot roast, root vegetables, and gravy, topped off with tarts Amy and I picked up at Dartmouth, Randy showed us slides of their Alaskan Cruise.  They travel on a small boat, about 12 passengers plus crew, that was built in the 1930's.  In such a craft, you can get up close to the glaciers and coastline.   It's difficult to comprehend how enormous this all is.

The next morning, Amy and I set out on the twisty, picturesque Vermont roads for Bristol, Vermont. There are Moose Crossing signs everywhere.  I do my Bullwinkle imitation (it is just my way.)  No moose arrive, but a mother black bear and her three babies scurry across the road in front of us.

8 of the 20 members of our group met at Vermont Bike Tours headquarters in Bristol and boarded a shuttle for Lake Champlain.  It was a quiet ride.  Maybe we were sizing each other up - who was gonna blubber like a baby at the first sight of hills or wind?

We made some passing comments about the Vermont scenery - the solar panels, the houses for sale (courtesy of Hurricane Irene 3 years ago).  Electric poles have artificial osprey nests built on top, and the ospreys were coming back in full force.  Then there was Lake Champlain itself, 125 miles long and anywhere between 1/2 a mile to 40 miles wide.  Yeah, it's kinda big.  And we were gonna bike right down the islands in the middle.

Our first spot was the North Hero Inn on Hero Island.  In true VBT fashion, the Inn was ritzy.  We had our own balcony overlooking the lake with a hammock. Across the lake, four enormous wind turbines caught the considerable lake breezes.  It was ... kinetic, I think.  There was a sense that even as you were on vacation, you were in motion.  Which is Newton's First Law of motion right there.

So the twenty of us met for a trial bike ride.  VBT provides the bikes and helmets, and you bring bike clothes and gloves and your favorite other stuff.  We did seven mile trial run, which was mostly flat, but it was good practice for reading cue sheets.  We took our first "optional leg" - a four mile jog up the lakeshore and back, which Amy and I did.

The ride shook out the "social cobwebs" and we met for dinner and chatted like old buddies.  I mean, none of us knew each other beforehand (except our pardners, which came in various configurations).   So we met Alan and Judi from Omaha, close to my old stomping grounds in Lincoln.  Every year for the past few years, Alan hikes from one rim of the Grand Canyon to the other in one day without camping.  If you've ever seen it (I haven't yet), this is quite a feat, and it requires being in shape, obviously, and a bit of planning.  Alan has this cool, booming laugh that I can tell will be one of the defining sounds of this trip.

Ximena and Alvery are from Chile.  They definitely the "furthest from Vermont" award.  This is their fifth or sixth VBT tour, and it's very clear they have visited more places than I will ever go.  In the United States, even!   They speak English very well, idiomatic and formal.  Amy and I grill them about places to visit in South America, and they're pretty positive about Brazil.  Which means we have to go.  I'm a big fan of Bossa Nova and MPB (Música popular brasileira) so it doesn't take much persuading.

The forecast this week is for cold, wind and rain.  Amy asked me in private, "if it's raining, do they give you a free spa day?"  I have no idea - my only VBT trip had no rain.  You can always ride in the van - rain or no rain - but the van will hold only 10 or so people.  Someone's gotta ride.  I volunteer!