Biking to the Islands

The last couple years I've become a very enthusiastic bike rider (I guess it's the Vermonter in me coming out, much to my horror). Burlington has a ton of great bike trails, not all of which contain fragments of my teeth embedded in them. I've fallen into a pattern of, weather permitting, biking around fifteen or twenty miles a day, which, as long as it's flat (and this little corner of generally hilly/mountainous VT is) isn't really that far on a bike. In August (and now, happily, July and August) there is a bike ferry that connects a gap in the causeway, which allows you to make it all the way up to the Lake Champlain islands, which then give you many more options for biking. The islands themselves are very interesting - very flat and agricultural, with lots of little interesting places to stop for crafts or snacking. One of my favorite places is a combination of gift shop/coffee shop/pizzeria/post office up on North Hero Island called Hero's Welcome, which I've driven to many times (and which, insh'allah, I'll eventually bike to). The causeway stretches out from Colchester out into the lake itself, naturally enough, so you ride for a long time on this sandy path, surrounded by lake on both sides - the views are spectacular, although you can't get too caught up in the scenery for fear of riding off into the water. There is a break in the causeway which I suspect is probably thirty or forty yards, to allow for water vessel passage. During weekends in July and August you can, for $10, jump on on the bike ferry to take you to the other side of the causeway. From there you can ride up to South Hero Island, and then on to the other islands from there. I had always heard about it, but never actually made the trip until last August when I went with my friend Trish (who is a complete fitness nut who cycled me into the ground). The only thing you have to be careful about is making sure that you don't miss the last trip of the day, which, as long as the weather holds out, is 6:00 p.m. - if you miss it, then you're stuck on one side or the other, neither of the options are particularly horrible, obviously. The thing I had not considered until last weekend was what would happen if the ferry had to shut down mid-day because of bad weather, but, again, if your two choices are staying on either the Burlington or South Hero side, this is not a Scylla/Charybdis choice. I was supposed to meet my friends Mike and Andy around 9:30 down by the lakefront in Burlington (the ferry starts at 10:00 a.m., and we had to take the bike path up to Colchester), but I ended up getting there late because of a series of goofy misadventures (I was going to take my friend Bill's girlfreind Annie along, but we had to abandon the plan when we couldn't get air into her tires because the valve was too sophisticated for the air pump at the gas station - all I managed to do was actually let all the air out of her tires, and I'm sure we can learn something about general uselessness from this story). Anyway, I was late, and Mike and Andy, like the good souls they are, were patiently waiting for me. When I arrived I discovered that Andy only had $5 on him and they were planning on biking back up the hill to to go to an ATM. Since I had stopped along the way already at my bank to pick up some money I volunteered to pay for his trip on the bike ferry, to which Andy agreeded, and then pointed out that I also needed to buy him some food along the way (since he's only a couple years older than my son I guess we've developed the same sort of relationship). In one of the pictures we've stopped and are paying for the bike ferry - and we discovered that, even out on the tip of the causeway, they took plastic, which led Mike to suggest that since I would be paying cash for Andy's food later on, that Andy might use his card to pay for my bike ferry ride, which Andy viewed as very faulty logic, and, in defense of the purity of philosophy, declined to pay (but did so in such a charming way that we forgave him, and, of course, made sure he had plenty to eat later). I'm including a ton of pictures, but it was a beautiful day. We made a couple stops, one of them at a farm stand along the way, which included a place to get hamburgers/hotdogs, creemees and see some animals - and one of the animals came to see us. In one of the pictures you can actually almost hear Andy saying "dude, this fudge is max delicious." The round trip ended up being around forty miles, although we stopped before we made it to North Hero and the mythical Hero's Welcome (which, I'm guessing, would have added another ten miles or so to the journey). I was hoping to make the trip again this weekend, but everybody is out of town, and I couldn't quite rally myself to make the trip by myself (although I'm ending up biking about twenty miles a day both days anyway). Maybe next weekend.