Weather: Sunny, pleasant, light wind
Portages: 0
Wildlife: Loons, great blue herons, deer, fox, actor
Dinner: Target Vindaloo dinner, chocolate pudding with Door County Chocolate Cherries
The Holiday Harbor Motel was very nice. They gear toward fisherfolk and have a dock/piers. The rooms were nicely decorated and we slept well. Got up at 5:30 am, called Heidi (our waitress and second trail angel), at 6:20 to pick us up. Rigged up her pickup truck to hold up the canoe, rather questionably, but it worked, and drove us back south to the Gut. I was concerned about needing to make a certain distance to North Hero Island IF the winds would be strong, so thought starting in the Gut was a reasonable place. Turns out we could have started at Gordon's Landing, where the ferry ended as we had great weather, but then we wouldn't have met trail angel #3.
Paddled on the east side of the island. Beautiful water, interesting shoreline. Stopped at North Hero General Store for treats and a picture in front of the NFCT kiosk before heading back out. I was still edgy from damaging the canoe, so even though the weather looked okay, we took the safer route by crossing through a small culvert into the west side Allsburg Passage at The Carrying Place. The culvert was crazy fun and eerie. We had to lay back down into the canoe in order to get through. Beckie said she was doing the bridge pose in yoga. My knees would have scraped the top, so I was tucked in sideways at one point. I was just getting to the point where I had had enough and was ready to back out, but Beckie being 15' in front of me said it was getting higher and we were just about through. We used our hands to pull ourselves through. No cobwebs, so it was only creepy in how tight the spot was. But totally worth doing just for the ride. The inside west passage wasn't nearly as scenic, we thought, as the east side. The water was green and it seemed like there was more development.
 |
| Just past North Hero |
 |
| The culvert to Allsburg Passage |
 |
| Evidence of the record 2011 spring flood levels at Hero State Park in Lake Champlain. |
Made it to North Hero Island State Park at 2 pm, having passed the Holiday Harbor Motel's piers a short distance before the Hwy 2 bridge, where we had intended to camp for the night. I know the site had a reputation for being buggy, and the flooding is still evident, but it was UNBELIEVABLY buggy. There was no way you could spend anytime outside by the camping area reserved for paddlers. Not really a viable option for anyone when bugs are thriving. Since it was so early, and the water was calm enough (only a slight chop to the water,) we decided to continue on, crossing over the channel to the mainland, thinking we'd find another Holiday Harbor-like motel. We weren't. I told Beckie to look for any place that seemed to have a lot of chairs or matching cottages suggesting a resort. Just before entering the Missisquoi Bay, we spotted a likely looking place. Saw a guy mowing lawn across three yards, so we stopped to ask if this place had any availability. It wasn't a resort, but it WAS a place that happened to have empty cottages for visiting family members and, why, yes, we could stay the night there.
That night we watched the sun set from the comfortable chairs in the west and a full moon rise behind us in the east.
This is a much longer story, but the synopsis is that trail Angel #3, Mike, gave us a cottage to use, offered to let us use his car if we needed anything, took us for a tour around Hog Island with a history lesson, then took us out in the morning to scout out the next two dams on the route. We had no idea when we showed up on his shore, but later learned that Mike is a pretty famous character actor, appearing in 100s of TV shows and movies and lives part time in LA. He was absolutely wonderful and wouldn't let us buy or make him anything. He even had brought us to a grocery store where we picked up a gallon of water and some soda that we observed he liked and had planned to leave as a thank you gift, but he beat us to the register and ended up buying his own thank you gift. Geez... but thanks Mike.
