Back to Vermont—August 31

 The final rides of a trip are always bittersweet, loving the ride, and at the same time, looking forward to getting home.  Our group has been so small, only eight people for the last 2 1/2 weeks, so saying good bye tomorrow will be even harder.  We had a nice dinner tonight, talking about our favorite parts of this trip and thinking about rides we might want to do in coming years.  I think we are all especially grateful to feel like life is almost normal while we are riding, after all the cancellations and restrictions of the past year or so.

We rode 48 miles today into Middlebury, Vermont.  We lost count of the number of times we crossed the Hudson River, but we know that today was our second crossing of Lake Champlain. To celebrate the ride, I had an excellent doughnut in the morning from an orchard/bakery, a Creemee, as soft ice cream is called in Vermont, with my Middlebury friends in the afternoon, and a half piece of coconut cream pie after dinner.  That’s going out on a high note!

                             How many bikers does it take to supervise changing a tire?  

                                     We called this fashionable lady Venus de Crown Point

Our lunch stop was at the Crown Point Bridge, the narrowest span across Lake Champlain.  Both the French and the British had forts here in the 18th century.  The stonework in the photo dates from the French fort in the 1730’s.

                                                        Goodbye New York, hello Vermont