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| We stopped to buy $100 worth of
Canadian gas before we entered the province of Quebec. At $1.18 a
liter (3.8 liters to a gallon) - that would be $4.48 US dollars a gallon,
we didn't want to fill up until we re-entered the US. It was strange
to see all the road signs in French when we entered Quebec. |
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| Just south of Montreal, we
turned south heading toward New York state where we crossed the border and
were "home" again. We were cautious when crossing because
we had a home grown tomato from Arkansas, along with several packages of
meat that Ann had removed from the original packaging to vacuum pack
it. Once, while crossing back into the US we had a bad experience
with a border agent that was in a bad mood and threatened to fine us $300
because I forgot to declare a pound of ground beef. When we reached
the crossing gate, the patrolman kept yelling a word at us in
French. Jerry finally yelled at him and told him that we didn't
understand what he was saying. He replied that about 90% of those
who cross the border here are French. He was simply telling us to
move ahead. Ann told him, "We only speak Southern . . . we
don't speak French." He took our passports and, immediately,
there was a commotion at another stall and all the border patrol agents
went running to that spot. They jerked a guy out of a car and
handcuffed him, diverting attention from the rest of us. We sat
quietly until our agent returned, handed our passports back and told us we
were free to go. We had a collective sigh of relief and off we went. |
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| We drove south to Champlain, NY
then turned east to Hwy 2 which would take us down through a series of
islands in Lake Champlain. We stayed in Apple Island Resort for the
night and had a wonderful campsite overlooking the lake. |
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| Ahhhhhhhh. Nap time. |
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| The next day, July 9, we entered
the beautiful state of Vermont camping at Button Bay State Park.
Vermont State Parks don't have hookups but they have a 4-hour window each
day when you can run your generator to recharge the batteries. We
were thrilled to finally be in cooler temps, waking up to 57 degrees the
next morning but we were still having generator issues. It would
start fine but, when put under load, it would die. Jerry decided
that, perhaps, the fuel filter he had put on wasn't right so he went into
the town of Vergennes to a CarQuest store and bought another filter and
installed it. Voila! It worked just fine. Thank God for
having a man around who can do anything! |
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| Our first tour stop in Vermont
was the Shelburne Museum. Located
in the scenic Lake Champlain Valley, the museum is known as one of the
country's finest, most diverse, and unconventional museums of art and
Americana. Over 150,000 works are exhibited in a 38 exhibition buildings,
25 of which are historic and were relocated to the museum grounds.
Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888-1960) was a pioneering collector of American
folk art and founded Shelburne Museum in 1947. Note that Annie got
her first "old-folks' discount" at this museum - life is good! |
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| When creating the museum,
Electra took the imaginative step of collecting 18th- and 19th-century
buildings from New England and New York in which to display the museum’s
holdings, relocating 20 historic structures to Shelburne. These include
houses, barns, a meeting house, a one-room schoolhouse, a lighthouse, a
jail, a general store, a covered bridge, and the 220-foot steamboat Ticonderoga
built in 1906. The Ti plied the waters of Lake Champlain from 1906
until 1954. When decommissioned, it was floated on Lake Champlain to
within 2 miles of the museum. It was then moved two miles overland
to its current location In 1955, in a remarkable engineering effort that
stands as one of the great feats of maritime preservation. |
