Saranac & Saranac on a Saranac
Saranac, New York
Saranac River
Town of Saranac
Town of Saranac Lake
Saranac Chain of Lakes
Upper Saranac Lake
Middle Saranac Lake
Lower Saranac Lake
Six Different Saranac Beers
Boats and Bikes ~ Bixi Montreal
pianos and bikes in the park
Montreal was founded hundreds of years before the automobile, and never really got on board with the whole idea. Many streets in the old quarter are still cobblestone and narrow, more suited to carriages and peddler carts. That’s part of the appeal. And like many old cities, they’ve only grudgingly made concessions to cars. Parking is a hassle. Within 8 hours of arriving, we got our first parking ticket. That’s what the nice lady who let us in was trying to say: We had to move the car by morning for the street cleaners, and shuffle from spot to spot like a shell game every few days, or we’d start paying fines. Once we found a safe and free place to leave the car, we did, and didn’t fool with it again for the remaining three days in the city. And, fortunately, didn’t need to. Bicycles were a much better way to get around. Waaaay better.
Boats and Bikes ~ Montreal, Quebec
Montreal Cathedral by night
Getting into Canada was a real a pain. The drive from Burlington would normally take about 2 hours door to door. But there was some sort of security alert in effect, coupled with a whole bunch of Canadians returning from some weekend event in the States. It took four+ hours, two of that to go one mile at the border. We almost went through a back country crossing, one we saw at the north end of Lake Champlain, but didn’t have a map or GPS for the country roads beyond. Should have. Even lost and wandering in the woods would have been a faster than the highway.
Boats and Bikes ~ Island Line Trail
an elegant classic sloop shoots “The Cut” in the video
Back when Burlington began reclaiming the waterfront, one of the first things they did was reacquire the old railroad bed running along the shore, a strip of land that effectively put the lake behind a fence. Once in public hands again, not only was access restored to most of the shore, but the graded bed provided a perfect foundation for a walking and biking trail. That’s how the Island Line Trail was born, and it now runs roughly 12 miles north out of Burlington.
Boats and Bikes ~ Shelburne, Vermont
What you give up with airbnb is the comfort of predictability. There will be no desk clerk paid to wait for your arrival, no bellhop to take your bags, no beige carpet or generic art on the walls identical to that in 200 other identical rooms. What you gain is the unexpected. You typically stay in people’s private homes, with no formal checkin process, with hosts who have a natural interest in meeting other people. That was certainly our experience.
Boats and Bikes ~ Burlington, Vermont
panorama of the harbor on Lake Champlain, Burlington
Thomas Armstrong, over at 70.8%, would applaud this series. His interests range widely across art and history, but his flights often start from and circle back to sailboats and bicycles. The two modes of travel are amusingly compatible bedfellows – one for water and one for land. Both experienced their heydays at the turn of the 19th Century. Both are engine free, efficient, and often elegant means of transportation – and remarkably functional anachronisms. After a recent trip I can confirm how well they compliment each other.
Merroir
Fresh raw oysters at Merroir
Regardless of how we faired sailing, there was one place I wanted to end up before the day was done – a restaurant on the south shore of the Rappahannock called Merroir.
In the wine industry, there’s a word used to describe how the same variety of grapes will produce a distinct flavor of wine, unique the place where it grows. It’s called terroir. The term merroir was created to reflect this same phenomenon for oysters. I love seafood, so anybody who loves it enough to invent new words for it is someone I need to know.