… a very comfortable night last night. The foam mattress isn’t good enough for what I need and an air bed would have made an enormous difference. But seeing as how I have my camp bed in my storage locker in Montreal, I’m not spending out on one for just a couple of days.

It didn’t help by having noisy neighbours – a couple of guys from Pennsylvania who arrived late, moved around a lot during the night and then drove off early in the morning. And while it didn’t actually rain, the condensation was terrific. Mind you, I must have slept during the night at some point because I was off on my travels again during the night, although I can’t remember now where it was that I had been.

But it did all have its compensations. At least the view from my tent (or, rather, from just around the corner from my tent) was pretty impressive, with the wind turbines that I had somehow managed to miss yesterday evening when I arrived.

Apparently I’m in the Green Mountains around here and quite a few of the ridges here have wind turbines on them. It’s a symptom of the constant American demand for power, more power, more power.

So having hit the road, my first stop was for some coffee at a service station up the road. And here I fell in with an old guy who was supplementing his meagre retirement pension by driving a lorry for a local farmer.

If you remember a good few years ago now whan I was in Trois Rivieres, I heard what I reckoned to be a two-stroke diesel. This truck was the same type, and made the same noise when it slowed to enter the garage, so that was what made me go over for a chat.

In fact, it’s a four-stroke but it’s the Jake Brake that makes it sound like a two-stroke and furthermore he remembers two-stroke diesels because there was a “Detroit” two-stroke diesel that was made until well into the 1960s, he reckons, and he thought that the sound was familiar too.

Having resolved the accommodation issue, I’m now officially on holiday and so I went for a short wander (more by accident than design) through some of the Green Mountains.

They really are beautiful – not quite as savage as the Appalachians next door or the Rockies, and this would be a beautiful place to come and explore when I’ve picked up my maps and so on from Montreal, which is planned for Tuesday next week.

On the Motorway, I headed for a rest area. Vermont is well-known for the high quality of its public wi-fi available on motorway rest areas and I was determined to take full advantage. I had a short chat with Liz and an even longer chat with Cecile.

I also had a most extraordinary encounter with a most extraordinary woman. A Quebecoise, she had been living for 9 months illegally in the USA in an old Dodge Caravan, and going back to Canada as her Dodge was about to give up the ghost.

She was one of these “New-Age” spiritualist healer-type of people and she insisted on trying to “heal” me – but I could have told her everything that she was trying to tell me, and a good deal more too, so really she was wasting a good deal of her time. Like most of these “New Age” people, they don’t really understand the significance of what it is that they are doing.

Now, what do you reckon that this is?

I knew the answer to this straight away, long before I ever saw the faded and derelict sign torn down at the side of the property. It’s an abandoned and derelict drive-in cinema, a symbol of 1950s and 1060s USA. I reckon that more children of that era were conceived at one of these drive-ins that an any other place in the whole of the USA and it’s a shame that they no longer function.

Not that there is anything worth watching at the cinema these days.

But I’d come here, seeing as how I was in the vicinity, to visit another RV dealer. He wouldn’t sell me a slide-in camper back for Strider as he was aware of issues that no-one else knew. And that was that the weight of the camper distorts the body of the truck and causes the doors to fly open when you go over a bump.

I must admit that I’ve not heard of that one before (and neither has anyone else with whom I’ve talked)

So here I am at my campground – the Goose Point campground at Alburgh, Vermont. I’m a stone’s throw from Canada, a mere cock-stride from New York, and I’ll be staying here for four days so that Labour Day can pass me by.

I have a noisy spot, right by the road, but one of the most impressive views that I could wish for – right across Lake Champlain – and all at $84 for the four nights, so beat that if you can. It’s not even the price of a motel room for one night and the camping gear that I bought is now paid for (in spades).

We have free showers, a washing machine at just $1:00 a load (and I’ll be taking full advantage of that in due course just as soon as I’ve found a pile of quarters) and a few other bits and pieces too.

But it’s no surprise that the American people are so … errr … large. Here, we are just 200 yards away from a marina and boat-launching ramp, and the number of people who are travelling from the camp to the marina … on golf carts.

No-one seems to walk anywhere any more in the USA and so the obesity crisis is no surprise. A good walk or two every day would do these people good. How ever this lot became the Master Race totally defeats me.