U-S-A! U-S-A!

We’d thought about staying in Burlington until Wednesday.  Burlington is a very cool town with very cool shops and restaurants and delicious bagels.  However, Dana solved the mystery of how Church Street got its name so we decided that yesterday would be our last day on that stretch of Lake Champlain.

To most of the country, Vermont basically is in Canada.  The crowd in the park watching the U.S. Women’s National Team win the World Cup might disagree.  Big crowd, big win for Our Team.

One last sunset over the shores of New York.  Dang, it just doesn’t get much better than sunsets with a glass of wine on Misty Pearl’s bow.  With Oscar, of course.

Well, sleeping with the windows and hatch open on a cool night might be better.  Or at least as good.  So this morning we slept in with the hatch open and consequently got a late jump on the trip up to Rouses Point.  No worries though.  Not a cloud all day, although we did come across the fairly hideous Colchester Reef “Lighthouse.”

Vermont shoreline is better than the New York shoreline, although both are pretty dang spectacular.

Rouses Point is the last town before Canada.  It’s on the New York side so we kind of expected the kids to be playing stickball in the streets under spray from fire hydrants, but instead we found them fishing or otherwise messing around in what looked like a place where a wind gust would put them in the water.  This probably is a good place to be a kid.  If you enjoy wearing snow pants.

There are a couple of marinas in Rouses Point.  We know that, because for about a week we dithered over which one to use.  Dana made a reservation at a place someone recommended.  Then someone else recommended the other place instead.  Then someone else chimed in.  Anyway, we ended up at Gaines Marina, just in time to see them patriotically mowing the lake.

A quick look off our stern showed us why.

We last encountered this strainer-clogging mess last summer in Canada and now it’s this summer and basically we’re in Canada so we guess it makes sense.

In fact, we’re so close to Canada that the lampposts have Canadian flags.

From here we probably could throw a baseball across the border if (1) we had a baseball and (2) we wanted to litter in Canada before we even arrive.  We almost can smell the pickerel (yum) and the poutine (yuck).  We’re meeting more Canadian boaters than American boaters at our marina, which came in handy when Dana needed help with a reservation request form that was in French.  Canadians all are super nice.

Rouses Point was a big smuggling port during prohibition, which is interesting but not that important to us.  It also is at the source of the Richelieu River, which is both interesting and important since that’s where we’re headed.  So we’re going down the river, but north, which is up to anyone looking at a map.  Very confusing.

Tomorrow we cross to the other side, so this is the last evening with the Gold Loop burgee.  Tomorrow the maple leaf goes back up, where it’ll stay until we get around to Maine in a couple of months.