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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.

 

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Boats and Bikes ~ Island Line Trail

an elegant classic sloop shoots “The Cut”  in the video

 direct video link

 

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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Gwynn’s Island ~ Tandem Barry Boats

Sailing at Gwynn’s Island video link

 

Writer friend and fellow sailor Doug Lawson was out visiting from California last weekend. A crazy amount of stuff got packed into a couple of days, making the most of the trip. Top of his wish list was to go sailing, and sailing we did.

Doug owns a Crawford Melonseed. He sails it in lakes around San Francisco, at Tahoe, and estuaries near Santa Cruz. With an experienced Melonseed sailor in the house, this was finally the first opportunity since my boats were built to have them both on the water at the same time. Exciting!

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