… is a photo of the view from my “bedroom” window from last night. It is of course the new Champlain Bridge across the lake of that name between New York and Vermont, and it’s pretty spectacular too, especially when I remember that I have a tripod in the Dodge and so I can use a long exposure.

I can’t think of many better sights to see as I settle down for the night, apart from the lighthouse from the beginning of May 2012, but that of course was something special.

Last night though, there was no-one on duty at the camp site, which was not unexpected, and neither was the note “if there’s no-one on duty when you arrive, find a vacant space and check in at 08:00”. What was however unexpected was that when I got fed up of waiting and hit the road, it was 09:44 and there was still no-one about.

I also had an encounter with yet another dissident today. The USA seems to be crawling with them but, as I have said before, they only seem comfortable expressing their dissent with foreigners such as Yours Truly. It really is just like the old Soviet Union back in the USA just now. I was not joking.

I don’t travel far, though. Just to Port Henry where I encounter what is rather laughingly called a “preserved locomotive”. Port Henry was formerly a steel town, due to the fact that there was an iron ore mine in the interior, and between the port and the mine ran a railway line, the Lake Champlain and Moriah Railroad. It all closed down in the 70s but some of the rolling stock has been “preserved” and a redundant ALCO RS18 was donatrd by the Canadian Pacific.

Why I’m treating the “restoration” with total derision is because it consisted simply if walloping a few buckets of thick black paint all over everywhere just like the “Big Boy” in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the result is just the same. Red streaks of rust everywhere where the paint has been worn away, and the rust trailing down all over the rest of the equipment giving it all an air of total dereliction, which is exactly what it is.

Here’s no surprise. Yours truly is on a ferry. It’s always a bad idea for me to go near a ferry, because every time I see one it makes me cross. This is one of the ones across Lake Champlain between New York State and Vermont that was not done away with when the Champlain Bridge was opened and you may well be surprised to learn that after more than 5 weeks on the North American continent, this is the first ferry that I have taken.

Not like me at all, you might think, but then I have had many preoccupations this year and have not been my own master as far as things like that go.

The Vermont side of Lake Champlain brought me over a series of bridges back into New York and a small one-horse town called Rouse’s Point.

Students of Civil War might well be forgiven that Rouse’s Point was the largest town in the whole of the Union States, given the number of enlistments from there in the latter stages of the Civil War. The statistics are certainly impressive. However, that is only a small part of a very long story. Rouse’s Point is the town closest to the Canadian Border for Quebeckers, and in the latter stages of the war, the Union paid quite a substantial bounty to civilians who joined up to bolster the army for Grant’s Overland Campaign in Virginia in 1864 and 1865.

Thousands joined up from Rouse’s Point but probably not even one-tenth were actually from the town. All of the rest were Canadians from Québec who discreetly crossed the border into the town, signed up, did their training, received their bounty, and then promptly deserted. And there is considerable evidence to suggest that the same person enlisted in three or even more
regiments in order to receive three or more bounties. The enrolment books of many a New York, Vermont and Maine regiment have an entry “Rouse’s Point Bounty Jumper” against a name.

From Rouse’s Point it’s a mere cockstride back into Canada and along the Richelieu Valley to Sorel on the St Lawrence. And here the second ferry of the day (and second of the holiday) takes me across the river to the north bank and the town of St Ignace.

Onto the Highway at the back of the town and off to the Service Area near Lavaltrie. I spent my first night “on the road” here, and it’s fitting that i’ll be spending my last night here, because it really is my last night in North America for 2013 and that thought fills me with total sadness.