Days 84 & 85: Putnam Pond State Park, NY

Mike and Gloria stopped by on their way out of town and invited us to stay at their place as we travel west.  They live in Rochester, NY, just a few miles from the Northern Tier route.  Just minutes before then we had been reading in our route maps about how there were no campgrounds along a long stretch that included Rochester, so it would seem that they have solved a problem for us.

Who can resist having a picture taken with a giant squirrel?

It was finally my turn to deal with a road closure (we were thinking those we exclusively Alea's domain).  Fortunately, this one didn't add a lot of miles to the day, but we did have to substitute several miles of paved roads for gravel roads.

Yet another covered bridge.

 We took yet another ferry, this one to cross Lake Champlain in order to reach New York.  It was cable driven - a motor on the ferry pulled along two parallel cables anchored at each shore.

At Branbury State Park we were told they were booked for the weekend, so we were thinking with the great weather (highs now in the mid to upper 80s) that campgrounds might be hard to find.  So we decided to call ahead and book both Friday and Saturday at one campground.  That turned out to be Putnam Pond State Park ($23 primitive with hot showers, plus a $2.75 registration fee).

Alea at the point of where the two lobes of Heart Pond intersect.

We returned to Ticonderoga in the afternoon in order to get cell reception, where we ran into Peter again.  We took care of some other business in town and expected to see him on the road on our way back to camp, but there was no sight of him.  We thought he may have opted to go a bit further, to a campground located closer to the highway.  But he showed up at our campsite shortly after we had finished our dinner.

On Saturday morning we fixed a frittata (Peter preferred our "potato shit" description) for the three of us.  Then we headed back to Ticonderoga once again.  This time to get caught up on laundry, and to do one more big grocery shopping trip after realizing that we won't be in a city of any size for several more days.

We had to reorganize the back of the van in order to make room for Peter, and we joked about dropping him off in the middle of the woods and selling his bike on Craigslist in order to fund our travels (and he still got in the van)...

Peter puts his fate in the hands of two mysterious gypsies in a polka-dot van, never to be seen again...