jayfurr | Burlington to Port Kent

Today we did a bunch of random things to try to cheer Carole up and get her to feel a bit less stressed about work. Some of them worked better than others.

One random thing we tried (that I imagine most people wouldn't have thought of) was we took the Lake Champlain Transportation Company ferry from Burlington, Vermont to the tiny little town of Port Kent, New York. We've talked for years about parking at the ferry dock in Burlington and taking our kayaks across to Port Kent on the ferry, then kayaking back, 10 miles as the duck paddles. We'd even thought about doing that today but when the weather came in rainy and depressing, that plan was clearly out.

Or was it? We could at least take the ferry over and scout out how easy it might or might not be to launch from near the ferry dock. We took that ferry across to Port Kent a good many years ago and neither of us had any recollection of what the area around the ferry dock on the New York side might be like. For all we knew it'd be private docks and houses and stuff, and we wanted to make sure that there'd be a place to launch from without having to tote our kayaks a half mile.

We left our car in Vermont at a public parking lot near the ferry dock and paid the pedestrian fare for the one-hour ferry ride on the M.V. Adirondack. It has an upper deck with a gift shop and snack bar and bridge and a lower deck where all the cars park. It rained off and on a good bit on the way over but that made for a curiously refreshing, tranquil experience, not unlike listening to one of those environmental soundscape CDs of a rain forest... only in the round, with visual accompaniment. When we got to New York we got off long enough to walk around the ferry dock area and note places quite close by where we could legally launch from, and then we got right back on the ferry and took it back across to Vermont. More rain followed on the way and our captain sounded his look-out-here-I-come horn to cue inattentive small craft out of the way. In the mist, they might have missed us until too late. (Rim shot.)

As I am wont to do, I put up a page of pictures from our little nautical excurson. They're at http://www.furrs.org/images/portkent/default.htm