8/12 - Lake Placid, NY to Burlington, VT - Day 58
 

The theme for today is: "Onward to New England".

It’s starting to sink in today that the summer long trip across America is finally winding down. One more week and we’ll be at the Atlantic Ocean. Today we took a short ride into Vermont.

We left the Northwoods Inn by 6:40 to find an espresso. Since we stayed in town and not with the rest of the group at the fair grounds, we were on our own for breakfast. The plan was to have a coffee and muffin in Lake Placid and to have a more complete breakfast down the road. We pick up latte and muffins at a shop and then watched the sunrise over Mirror Lake. A wonderful way to start the day!

We were on the road by 7:15 heading toward Whiteface Mountain. The sky was clear and the air cool enough to be wearing jackets. It started to warm up by the 10 mile mark at the ski area.

We stopped at 8:30 at the Country Bear for a breakfast of French toast. We were back on the road and at the 15-mile mark by 9AM. Since the total number of miles for the day was scheduled to be 48 miles, we were already a quarter done for the day and it was still early. The roads were starting to look more and more like New England roads, two lanes, shady, winding and hilly.

At the 27-mile mark the road climbed very steeply for a brief time. The route sheet claimed that the grade was 21%. That means for every 100 feet you went forward, the road climbed 21 feet! That would make it the steepest that we’ve encountered during the entire trip!!! Thankfully the steep section was short and behind us quickly.

Before we knew it, we were at the picnic stop. It was about 11 AM. The number of people for the tour this week has grown to over 120 people, including the riders going coast to coast, the weekly riders and the Cycle America staff. There were a lot of new faces at the picnic stop.

We took a ferry from Port Kent, NY across Lake Champlain to Burlington, Vermont. We got on the 12:25 ferry and it was about an hour long. So we got to Burlington about 1:30 and went directly to the downtown pedestrian mall and found a Ben and Jerry’s for some Ice Cream. I understand that the factory is on the route tomorrow. I think that a tour of the factory is in order.

I’m now trying to catch up on the past six days of logs. The towns that we’ve been in for the past week have been so small, that access to update my log and access e-mail has not been possible.