TOWING IN LARGE SCALE

We idled too long in New York and found ourselves with nine days to make our way to Acadia.  The Adirondacks, Vermont and New Hampshire are going to be a blur.  We are traveling on The Rand McNally large scale road Atlas.  We sought advice from Airforums friends and the suggestions were helpful but gave us even more reason to regret moving so fast. 

So we pulled out Rand McNally, cobbled together an off-Interstate route linking as many “Scenic Roads” as the two gentlemen provided.  What could go wrong?

Leaving our Adirondack layover at Lake Durant, we hurried through the rest -- the upper Hudson River, the lovely village of Brant Lake, climbs and curves and glimpses of ponds, tidy brown and yellow signs tantalizing us with new delights just down a side road.   North along Lake Champlain to Crown Point, we lunched at the State Park, climbed the Quadrecentenial Lighthouse adorned with a sculpture of Champlain by Rodin. 

You know that vacationers to Maine say that you can smell the Balsam just as you cross the state line?  Well, from the lighthouse overlooking the bridge to Vermont, you can smell the manure from the factory dairy just across the border and entry into Vermont can be confirmed within a quarter mile with the first placard announcing Vermont Maple Products.

 

 

The Champlain Valley is as green and fertile and as picturesque as any we have seen. Postcard farms, red brick farm houses dating back 250 years, cropland everywhere, Holsteins all under roof, very few roaming the pastures.

This is Great! Rand McNally lead us on!  But as our trail of little green dots dipped Southeast at Bristol and the nicked the Green Mountain National Forest, we hardly noticed our road change from thin red to grey (ominous music here).  We followed the New Haven River past a significant falls with one confirmed topless sun bather.

“Eyes on the road, Mister.”

 The stream got smaller, the in-stream boulders larger and we purely did not notice that the road now slanted upward and had renamed itself Lincoln Gap Road. Now we all know about gaps; those are places where the hiking trails go Up in both directions and the roads go Down. They are narrow and steep and twisty and no place to haul a 7000 pound trailer.  We know this, but the road is well surfaced, except where it’s not and there is no traffic if you ignore that motorcycle whose driver was making that circular gesture near his head.

 We proceeded on.  In lowest gear, the transmission temperature gauge achieved a record number just as we reached the gap and found 60 cars filling the trailhead parking for the Long Trail.  We tipped over the gap and headed down what turned out to be the steep side.  Engine dumping unburned fuel out the tailpipe trying to slow us, trailer and SUV brakes heating up, all of these vapors streaming backward, the propane warning light in the trailer set up a piercing beeping. 

“Well it can’t be the smoke alarm.” (That failed last night and a new 9 volt didn’t fix it)

 “For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

We proceeded on...