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Our 10 days in the USA have been wonderful. To get here we spent 5 days cycling south from Montreal down the very beautiful Lake Champlain. Neither of us had heard of this lake before our friend Nancy suggested we take this route and meet her at Lake George just below Champlain.
Lake Champlain has lots of islands linked by bridges orshort causeways and some great island-hopping cycle routes. The area is relatively well-populated so there were quite a few eateries. Nevertheless, being on bikes meant that we were dependent on whatever the local stores had which was at times very limited. It's surprising how good instant mash potato and a tin of pasta 'meat' sauce can taste!
The US border control was very parochial but the guards still managed to make us feel guilty for nothing. A notice states that they had a duty to be courteous but we decided that their definition of 'courteous' was different to everyone else's.
We spent our first couple of days in Vermont seeing signs for places that reminded Fran of home including Colchester, St Albans and Essex. But much of the time we were at the Shelburne Museum. This is an amazing collection of buildings and artworks collected by Electra Webb whose family made their fortune from the sugar industry in the 1800s. There was even the last paddle steamer to ply Lake Champlain, the Ticonderoga and the story of how it was transported 2 miles overland in something like 3 months in the 1950s.
We crossed into New York state by ferry across the Lake and loved cycling onthe edge of the Adirondak mountain ranges lining the side of the Lake.
Nancy met up with us near the top of Lake George. We had a lovely evening catching up on the last 11 years. After the 3-hour drive to Binghamton we spent three days at Nancy's - mainly relaxing, planning and boxing the bikes for the flight to the Rockies - oh and eating massive ice creams and trying unsuccessfully to contribute to the score at the US equivalent of a pub quiz.
The options for transporting the bikes were complicated but in the end Nancy dropped us off at an 'airbnb' in NYC (parked her car at JFK aiport with our bikes in it, flew to California) and then dropped off our bikes at La Guardia airport 4 days later.
Our time in NYC was fantastic. We were true tourists, albeit tourists on a budget! We walked miles and saw most of the iconic buildings in Manhattan. The tour of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island (where all imigrants entered from the mid 1800s up to the 1930s) was excellent although also a lesson in 'crowd control'. The 9/11 memorial was moving, made more so by its design and the flow of the water. Suria Clarke, a colleague of Fran's from her time in Brussels died in the attack.
The highlights were the Metropolitan Museum of Art and seeing a show (Blue Man Group) albeit off Broadway! We will definitely have to return at some time in the future.
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