Green Mountains and Aldi Stopover For The Night

My last blog finished up with us scooting our way out of the campground that didn't allow dogs. 

That day was our official "turnaround day" . We have gone as far east as we could go, and now it's time to turn around and head back West.  Yes, to head towards home. Our goal today is to cross back into New York and head up towards the St Lawrence Seaway. 

We will look for a spot to cross over into Canada. Hopefully we are going to loop up over the top of Algonquin Park, through Sudbury, and back down into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan by the Soo locks. From there it's just a hop skip and jump back home to Wisconsin. 

One of the things that I think we are really enjoying on this trip is taking mostly back roads. We're really not happy about taking the interstates if at all possible.

We do enjoy looking in little towns at some of the architecture and the homes. Especially the older historic ones. We enjoy winding up and down through little valleys and up over little hills.

I snapped pics along the way of the countryside through Vermont and New Hampshire. 

I wonder about this house. It's an early version of a duplex. I wonder if maybe two sisters lived here side by side years ago?

Almost every little town has a big white church steeple sticking up. We noticed that so many of the homes are restored older homes rather than new ones plastered up all over. It's very quaint and pretty, and each town is very much like the next. 

Many of the towns we went through are old mill towns. Remnants of big huge mills along the rivers, which powered them, are left behind. Mills for production of paper, wool, grains etc. We notice a lot of these big mill buildings have been transferred over into condos or into shopping centers for cute little boutiques.

A lot of the rural farm houses are built in the tradition of shed after shed connected together that connect right to the barn. This way the farmers had access to their animals during the heavy snows of winter, but the heat from the animals helped to heat the buildings and over into the house and living area too. 

We saw many homes built this way and it seemed to be a pretty common practice in building structures. 

Vermont, being the "Granite State", has an awful lot of cutaway sections to get the roads to wind their way through the Green Mountains. The rocks are just beautiful.

We found the different terrain refreshing as we wound our way along through the foothills leading up into the Green Mountains. 

Did you know that granite is so plentiful that it is used and reused as curbing around parking lots and along roadsides in Vermont. It must be cheaper than cement!

This is actually curbing in a Walmart lot. All over the state, it seems that every single edge of curbing is made of slabs of Vermont granite.

Here was something else we ran across that we thought was quite funny. We've all heard of roundabouts. We've all driven on them I think pretty much in many states. They are circles that help distribute the traffic easily at an intersection instead of stop and go lights. 

Well, we ran into an "OVAL-about"!!! 

After we drove through it, I had to actually look at it on Google maps and screenshot it. Yes, we went through an oval that helped cross five different roads.

Now it was time to get up into the Green Mountains. Even though we wanted to cross the state from east to west, there's no real way to do it. All of the mountains run diagonally from Southeast up to Northwest. Your best bet is to just find a valley and work your way up diagonally across the state of Vermont. Well, the choice of roads are pretty limited. We had to kind of break our own rules and hop on an INTERSTATE!!

I am sure it is much easier on fuel mileage by not climbing steep grades and easier on the brakes by not going down steep grades in the other direction. This way, we were eased on our route by the more level surfaces of the interstate.  It really wasn't too bad. Most of it was two lanes, increasing to three or four when nearing any larger population. But we really don't care for interstates at all if we can help it.

After a couple hours, we made our way up to the top of Lake Champlain. Here was the big bridge as we started to cross over the top way up on the Northern end of Vermont. 

We were so close to the Canadian border at this point! When we got to the end of the bridge we had a choice to go 1 mile right to Canada or left into New York State. 

We headed to the left because we weren't ready to cross there. We were trying to avoid the big cities in Canada of Ottawa and Montreal. We wanted to still cut across the top of New York State and head over towards the St Lawrence Seaway. 

We drove by this unusual shop of all these old antique rural items. It would have been interesting to go look, but it was closed for the day. 

On the other hand, it was probably good that it was closed. Otherwise we would have probably had to rent a U-Haul trailer to haul back all of the unique wonderful treasures I would have found there!

We worked our way across the top edge of New York State and decided we had enough driving for the day. Interstate driving really isn't for us, and I think we tend to feel worn out and sleepier after a couple hours. We looked up a small town of the name Malone and found a Walmart. The weather was going to be icky and rainy and there was no sense in getting a campground if we weren't going to enjoy it.

We pulled into the Malone Walmart and went inside to pick up a few grocery items. We also splurged on a rotisserie chicken. Rving friends Linda and Howard always called it "Pickin Chicken"  when they would stop and grab a rotisserie chicken. Namely because they would just pick away at it until it was down to the carcass and toss it in the trash.

After we made our purchases, we politely asked a manager if it was okay to overnight in the corner of the lot. Unfortunately, some Town ordinances or some management of individual stores tend to prohibit overnighting by RVs or truckers. Unfortunately, this store does not allow overnight parking. But she graciously told us that the Aldi lot down the road has no problem with it and we could go there for the night.

And that is just what we did! 

We were the only ones there. It was peaceful and quiet. We did notice there was a U-Haul dealer lot nearby with a couple of empty trailers there. My oh my, we could have rented one, hitched it up and took it back to that store when it opened in the morning! LOL

It did rain overnight, and there were some tornado warnings just north of us. We set our phones to give us an alarm if any dangerous weather approached the area. We took note of a secure space in between two cement block buildings that we could have pulled into if the weather had taken a turn for the worse. It's good to have a backup plan. 

But the rain came straight down and there was very little wind. We were able to spend the night with no problems.

On to the next day and the St Lawrence Seaway!

276 miles traveled today

1,807 miles so far