
Pulling out of the Lake Placid hotel into a light rain (yup wet again) and lots of road spray day 7 of our motorcycle vacation begins. The Adirondacks was just an awesome place to ride, even with the rain.
We needed to reach Port Kent, New York no later than 930AM in order to make sure we are on the first ferry of the day to cross Lake Champlain. We made it to the landing with about 10 minutes to spare! We were the first to board the boat (they move motorcycles to the front, not sure why but I enjoyed the perk). The ride across the lake on the Valcour (built in 1948) took about an hour before we rolled off the ferry and into Burlington, VT.
Our first stop in Vermont was Green Mountain Harley Davidson. I am very glad we did, Alan at Green Mountain turned us on to a different, more twisty, route over “Smugglers Notch” to get to our second stop. That second stop was the Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream Factory.
During the factory tour we got to see some of the history of the company, it started in a gas station, and how the ice cream is made today. At the end of the tour we got to sample a new ice cream “Triple Carmel” which both Debbie and I really liked!
After leaving Ben and Jerry’s it was only a short time before we were on the
Kangamagus (and no I don’t know how to pronounce it!). This could have been a great ride through the White Mountain National Forest, but, alas, it was a chore and a bit of a bore. There were way too many cars on the road that had no clue on how to drive the curvy, somewhat mountainous route. There was even an accident in one turn that I have no clue how it could have happened without a serious lack of driving skill and experience.
Coming out of the other side of the Kangamagus I was beat. We found a hotel, had a Mexican dinner and went to bed! The next day we are heading to the top of Mount Washington. By the way we are over 1500 miles on the trip so far.






The
From the top of Whiteface we headed into town to the Olympic Museum. The museum is in the Olympic ice rank facility and while small packs in a lot of history. This is a worthy stop if you are in the area.

We began the day’s motorcycle ride heading north on the Niagara Scenic Parkway. The parkway runs up the American side of the Niagara River and is an excellent “Chill-out” ride. When the parkway ended the Great Lakes Seaway Trail continued. The Seaway Trail runs along the coast of the lake but only in a few places is it actually on the coast, just as it was during the
admired the views of the lake. After a while we rolled up onto the Lake Ontario State Parkway, this parkway did actually run on the coast for a good part of the time. BUT, there was a 6-10 mile stretch of the road that was like riding on a washboard. By the time this part of the road was over we felt as if we had completed 100 rodeo bull rides, 1,000 jumping jacks and run a jack hammer for 10,000 hours! This was one of those rides where it was just horrible during but becomes funny and a great story afterwards.
The folks that work there were super friendly and knowledgeable! Turns out they are the sponsors of
After leaving Harv’s we got back on the Seaway Trail, after a little why we started talking about the time of day how much further we had to go. This was the point I realized that I had miscalculated the time required to get to Lake Placid. We decided to hop up on the Interstate and get going! We pulled into Lake Placid about 6PM, I really don’t like riding that long when we are trying to have a leisurely vacation.
We did not do a lot a riding today. We took the motorcycle to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls to check out the sites an some of the tourist trap things. We ended the day riding the Maid of the Mist boat up to the falls… and that is where we got wet today!

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lighthouses. The one thing that really surprised me was the amount of vineyards along the road. There was miles upon miles of grape vines, thousands of acres. This day’s ride, along route 5, has been our best, so far, for this year’s motorcycle vacation.
to have fixed the problem of the GPS not quite finding the dealerships but, there are still some problems like the road showing up in Lake Erie. If you
weather radar. About half way to the falls we could see rain in the distance and it was very clearly a heavy rain. Turning around at the first opportunity, we made a run back to the hotel…. LOL we did not make it. Quite well soaked we stopped under an overpass to wait out the storm. I am very happy that the hotel has a laundry.




