July 31, Wellesley Island

July 31, Wellesley Island State Park NY, Thousand Islands, St Lawrence River

I overlook the obvious – I don’t see what’s right in front of me.
I don’t see – I don’t know how.

I have learned much from taking pictures:

1. I need to have my camera – too many opportunities are lost if I don’t.
2. I need to realize what I’m looking at and say to myself, “Hey – this is a great picture!”
3. I need to realize that in this digital image age there is no cost to taking a picture and this opportunity will never come again and I should never say, “Naw, not this time.”

Well, those are only three things, but with a camera I am trying to photo-document what I see, rather than just receive light through my eyes…wandering around and taking it all for granted. I’m lucky to see what I see, no matter how incidental it may seem at the moment – it is everything I have. A camera is helping me to realize that.

So we have been on Wellesley Island for 5 days – I can’t call it camping because camping is in a tent with no amenities, just part of hard travelin’, and we ain’t doing that. Tonight V whipped up a great stir fry in our Westbend electric frying pan with all kinds of peppers/mushrooms/carrots/garlic/tofu/brown rice and Franzia wine, and here at the little table in the lap of luxury Aliner with NPR playing a cello concerto we’re settling our bones for a summer night rest. The air is in the 70s, and the water 72 degrees.

Little showery episodes every day or so as atmospheric waves travel up the storm track in the westerlies, shifted North for summer right up the St Lawrence valley. A little fresh water rain falling into the fresh water river and the fresh air…it is all blended into one, and the islands are forested green and lush, flowery profusions everywhere…flowers of all sizes and details, mushrooms of every description in the dampness. Ospreys fishing and rearing their young, and herons squawking and gorging, Canada geese and loons hollering, chipmunks squeeking and groundhogs scurrying all over the place, deer, fox, coyote, otters swimming from island to island with fish, toads hopping all over the place in the dusk as we carefully walk in the woods.

Looking at winter through pictures at this website, we see the flip side to the extremes:

http://wellesleyisland.net/latefebpics.htm

Here’s more on the place:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellesley_Island

Our campsite (grimace) is on Eel Bay, and we look west, upstream…although the current is negligible. We took the kayak out a couple of the days and wandered around on the Canadian side, swimming in the deep delicious glassy grassy and rock-bottomed river, miles across…easy to get lost among the islands - a compass comes in handy. Every island is spoken for with a house perched on real estate not much bigger than a tennis court, some, but at least it is rock, not sand. Lots of sailboats and powerboats, jetskis, and Canadians are so patriotic, it seems…waving flags from poles on islands and boats – they hardly miss an opportunity to proclaim their country. They pay high taxes, a reflection of a highly developed sense of social responsibility, I guess…hence the display of nationalism. They invest in each other.

Back on the US side on the State Park I tied shut the legs of pants I found left on a rock and filled the pants with bottles and cans left on the rock.

Long bike rides the other days around the island, and the folding bikes are perfectly serviceable for hills or distances…but the seats aren’t so comfortable after 10-20 miles and we’ll need to look into that. We pedaled up across the border to Canada…came back when we couldn’t squeeze over the bridge…but on the Island is a neat little Methodist community called Thousand Island Park, full of gingerbread fiction houses.
Getting to the island we crossed the US bridge with the truck/Aliner, and pedaled/pushed the bikes back up to the top for the view.

But the greatest place on the island we found was in the State Park, the little-used nature trails that are at the S end of Eel Bay – the woods and moss and meadows…everything in there was so very beautiful…we could follow deer and come back on a fox that had given us the slip once, and they didn’t seem to mind too much.

We’ll move on tomorrow to Kring Pt St Park, just down the river a few miles, and then we’ll figure our next move.

Port Ontario (Selkirk) - Cape Vincent

7/27/08 St Lawrence River

We have been moving too fast, but this State Park game is a learning experience as we must make reservations about a week in advance for the next weekend or all spots with electricity get grabbed up by savvy RV’ers and tenters – it’s a whole culture . We could do without electricity and run off the battery in the Aliner...but we haven't done that yet and we don't know how well that'll work or for how long - we do like lights and computers and radios and refrigerators and fans. We have a solar voltaic panel, but it only puts out 26W, probably not enough to restore the battery, although the fridge’ll run on propane and V can cook on the propane stove instead of the electric skillet. We need to get off the grid, but we’re busy looking around more than taking care of business.

I need to go to one of those interstate truck weigh stations and find out what we have – it seems we have a big load and we don’t need to add much to it. I also need to see about reinforcing the back bumper before it even thinks about tiring under the load of the trailer.

Back on Lake Erie we had to relocate the Aliner after having parked it at the wrong angle, it turned out, so I had the bright idea to move it without first dismantling, so I hitched it up to the little truck and pulled it around and under a tree for better shade…it being like 90 degrees in the shade on a sunny day. Well, the truck made it under just fine, but I dragged the front of the Aliner peak roof into a pine limb enough that it busted the middle vent cover opening mechanism (3 opening vents up there), so I had to seal the vent shut with a screw. We need a vent with a built-in 12V fan anyways…that’ll replace the broken one.

A few days ago we got a reserved campground on the St Lawrence River, just E of near Cape Vincent, where the Great Lakes start their run for the ocean. Let's see...Burnham Pt St Park. Before that was Selkirk Shores St Park at Port Ontario, on the Salmon River…they say there are salmon in the lake…not like there used to be, but we didn’t see them in the river. We paddled up the river till the rapids got too shallow and rocky, found a beaver dam on a tributary (beavers stayed hidden)…ran into some deer and itty bitty fawns, ate some crabapples (some serious orchards and vineyards along the lakes, with everything green and small), chewed some stems, watched herons and ospreys watching us…and there was a lighthouse at the mouth of the river.

So from there we went up to where the St Lawrence River begins and went to Burnham Point St Park - we set up the Aliner and swam in the river (something like 8 miles across, including islands, from bank to bank) and drove that evening to Tibbets Point Light:

http://www.capevincent.org/lighthouse/lighthouse_001.htm

…and the place is fine enough, but the thing was the foghorns projecting out, and a building devoted to building up steam to drive the horns – it must have been something on a foggy night.

Next morning we sailed the kayak out about a mile on a 10-15mph SW wind with just enough angle to get to the downstream end of Carleton Island, got behind the island hidden from the wind, and had a leisurely swimmingly clear-water gazingly paddlingly nice wander until we got up to the front of the island an hour or two later, away from the wind shelter, where the wind had increased to 20 or so and the whitecaps in our face make progress slow and strenuous, but fantastic as we stepped through the seas just off the shore…where the rocky shore was wall-like, reflecting waves kicked up a jostling seiche – there were houses along the coast all the way around but with long open areas between clusters of structures, we used those open areas for our own…and we wondered why there were so many houses on the upwind side of the island – there is a prevailing westerly, and the downwind side was so much more pleasant…and on the upwind side was an amazing edifice, a stone shell caved-in roof castle, built by the Remington (firearms) typewriter guy:
http://www.carletonislandvilla.com/cv.htm

…so we then sailed back downwind among the whitecaps with just enough angle to make it back to the campground.

Then we peddled up the river to the town of Cape Vincent…about 5mi to look around a little, and the next day we parked the truck there and took bikes on the ferry to Wolf Island, Ontario Canada, pedaled around 8 miles across through short-growth wheat fields and tall-growth flowers and past a bison ranch to the N end and took another ferry over to Kingston Ontario, a thriving metropolis of around 150,000 at the end of Lake Ontario where ships have ported for 300 years – big stone buildings, British-French flavor, and Canadians! Cool people, although they seem to relish those powerful, rich-tasting Canadian cigarettes a little too much, but they have a hardy bohemian character and a style of establishment-hippie independent thinking that puts most of us duped Americans to shame. It must be the winters that make them so tough…but everything seems pretty pricy, and it may be just too dern cold for us. It rained a few times during the day, thunderstorms that caught us in our raincoats and turned us cold and shivery, so we drank big beakers of coffee and pedaled up and down the streets of Kingston, witnessed a dedication of the Rideau Waterway by govt officials, complete with bagpipes. I forgot the camera, but the place is real photogenic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston,_Ontario

So we pedaled back and caught the last ferry to Cape Vincent, and then this morning when I went swimming a couple of young otters, I think, were chasing each other among the sandstone shelves along the shore. Later today we relocated down the river a little to Wellseley Island State Park, in the Thousand Islands, where we’ll be for 4 more days before we get to our next weekend reservation.

Campgrounds and houses and towns, human stuff, and no too much in the way of wildlife have we seen except what was mentioned, but trees and the rest of the summer plants are lush in this fairly wet year after a record setting snowy winter, and then a rainy spring in the midwest that filled up the Great Lakes - last summer the water at Cape Vincent was about 2 ft lower than now, and it is more than 3 ft higher than it was last November, and I was told it caused a fair amount of boat damage on rocks - not this year, though! Clear and deep fresh water flows among the islands, and we'll go take a look.

7/23/08 Lake Ontario

Big dead catfish were on the beach of Lake Erie, and where we were the coastal water was pretty muddy, choppy and now much for swimming or kayaking. The campground was an open zoo of RVers...not that we can complain, being among them.

NY State Parks are many and nice...some nicer than others in terms of wooded privacy...cost about $20/night, with electricity, showers...all the comforts. We have been moving along Lake Ontario for the past few days...rain and sun, crowded and empty...but we sleep well in our little camper and the truck pulls everything well, so we knock on wood...

So we got to Lake Ontario, deeper than Lake Erie and with better clarity from where we stood and swam…swam! The water was delicious, fresh and clear, but we were told the clarity was due in part to the zebra mussels, fingernail-size invaders from ocean ship bilges that do a remarkable job of consuming everything and then clogging intake pipes along the Great Lakes. I don’t know about that, having spent a fair amount of time looking through goggles as I cruised along the bottom like a mudshark, looking for the little critters…so far none found, but black bass and perch have wandered by, and languorous swaying aquatic plants I saw must be aiding the clarity situation. I recall similar clarity when I was up here 34 years ago…but I’ll keep looking for anything I can see underwater.

I think it was called the Potsdam Sea, about 100 million years ago…extended from the W side of the Adirondacks across this area and left sandstone deposits that are flat shelves of rock along the lake shore and up into the St Lawrence River that make for great platforms along the lake…stepping off the shelves to some mossy wet shelves is a slick time, but pebbly places are around that afford traction if you don’t mind getting feet jabbed with those edges.

Once in, the water temperature is around 73…easy to get into and heaven to navigate, like floating on air, as fresh to the taste as the air is to breathe…just a little more dense than the air.

And…Lakes Erie and Ontario have the greatest skipping rocks in the world…like big cookies or small dishes, 1/3” thick that’ll skip 10 times, maybe 15 on a good throw.

Ospreys and herons and kingfishers along the coast, loggerhead shrikes catching bugs inland, bats busy in the evening, barn swallows and purple martins swooping all over the place after anything that flies. Not much for biting bugs, but a few flies that like to chew on ankles.

Pics

Pics

TurtleToo is now a Pop-Up Trailer

July 19, 2008

TurtleToo became a pop-up trailer.

During June we healed, regrouped and worked on our next move - came real close to buying a sailboat, a 38’ Prout Snowgoose catamaran good for the globe, but then thought we’d be better off on terra firma for a while, taking the kayak with us for forays into mainly fresh water regions like lakes and rivers. We need fresh air rather than salt for a while, and a floating home is a little too much.

So TurtleToo is now a travel trailer, rolling across the planet behind our ‘92 Mitsubishi mini-pickup truck, with the kayak on the truck roof/shell.

On July 7 we got a 2003 Aliner Expedition trailer up in southern PA, based on an ad on the internet…but we had seen an Aliner at a FL state campground last winter, and V was enchanted with all the comforts – AC, heater, frig/sink/stove/microwave, table, bed, couch - especially when viewed from a tent.

So in this time of $4 gas we join the legions of motorists, nursing gas as we hold it to 50-55 mph near the shoulder on 65mph speed limit highways and everybody else breaking the speed limit (“Speed On Brother – Hell Ain’t Half Full”) like everything was normal with the economy and U.S. civilization as we knew it….but the truck alone gets near 30mpg (spark plugs – NGK Iridiums made a serious improvement – turned a Bosch platinum-sparked dog into a puppy) and with the trailer it’s around 27, except 25 when we crossed the PA Appalachians. So that’s 4 gallons for maybe 100 miles ever couple of days, wandering from campsite to campsite…or that’s the loose plan at this point.

We hit a campground on Raystown Lake (Corps of Engineers dammed Juniata River) in PA for a few days, then went and saw old pals (35 years back) Rich & Ei Arthurs and son Cub in Pittsburgh a couple of days and watched the Pirates lose, went N to the Allegheny River, and now we’re on Lake Erie. Three campgrounds, getting indoctrinated to highway mobility trailer living – towing parking plugging in wiring and watering…we have stuff in the back of the truck with a couple of folding bikes.

We rode a Rails-to-Trails along the Juniata River with does and fawns and groundhogs and chipmunks, kayaked Raystown Lake (swam across too) in deep forest greenery and ancient cliff stone, kayaked on the Monongahela and Allegheny and Ohio Rivers (the former 2 make the latter in Pittsburg) and pedaled around the city of Erie PA and on the NY grape coast of Lake Erie…here water’s too muddy for swimming, lifeguard rules etc, and to open breezy/choppy for kayaking…air’s been too smoggy for breathing…heading for Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence River soon.

But these campgrounds are itinerant trailer parks with all kinds of big rigs and dually-wheeled landcraft with DirectTV dishes and screened awnings and big-rig people, it seems…largely large of constitution and flying U.S. flags with lawn ornaments set up for the few short days sojourn – max allowed stay is 2 weeks at most places…but they come and go. Strings of colored lights add to the festive atmosphere at these state and federal campgrounds, V&I rubbing our eyes and ears in wonderment. Retirees at seated rest, families with little kids riding bikes and scampering around playgrounds, pup tents and motorhomes jammed into Lake Erie State Park for the weekend, every spot taken...a far cry from a couple of months ago paddling and sailing through the raw and unprotected natural world. I guess we’ll learn this new world for a while…maybe a couple of years…figuring how to stay comfy and get out of the mainstem flow of vacationers. It’ll take some solarvoltaic panels.

We learned to make a weekend campground reservation, and we have another reservation at Cape Vincent next weekend, where Lake Ontario flows into the St Lawrence…but between tomorrow (Sunday) and Thursday we’ll cover 300 miles along Lake Ontario when reservations aren’t necessary…

But I thought I was a shoo-in for a hawk-watching volunteer job up at Acadia National Park on the Maine coast but instead got the shoe-out…you can’t count your chickens. Who knows or cares why – you never know for real...but we had dreams of being there from mid-Aug to mid-Oct and now that ain’t gonna be.

What we’ll do instead is continue on that route toward Acadia with no timetable at all except to show up at sis’ Betz & Leona’s place on Swans Island before September, stick around there a while and then head S…maybe FL for the winter or somewhere else warm.