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!