This is the way to travel!

After a leisurely breakfast with Jane I did the short drive to the Champlain islands ferry from Vermont to Plattsburgh, NY. Here's a look north up the lake during the short crossing, taken from the boat's upper deck. You can see Penny's roof in the foreground. [Photo taken with my camera and e-mailed to my laptop; it isn't going through so I'll have to add it when I get back to my desktop PC at home.]

Crossing into Canada was easy, though the uneven surface of the very high, very narrow bridge over the St. Lawrence to Cornwall, ON, was unnerving - I kept telling myself that it's sounder than it appears. I'm sure reentry to the U.S. tomorrow at Port Huron, MI, will be slower - this morning I could see a long line of southbound cars at the U.S. border control gate trying to get into New York.

Since I have lots of time to make my Friday noon lunch in Indiana, I took a side trip to the Iroquois Lock on the St. Lawrence Seaway. A bit of a laugh, actually; I did get to see the lock in operation, but (1) the "ship" being dropped to the next lower level of the seaway was a sailboat, maybe 30 ft. long, dwarfed by the lock designed for oceangoing ships; and (2) the drop in water level appeared to be just a few inches.

On my way back to Highway 401 I detoured again, to the Carman House Museum in the village of Iroquois. I sort of barged in when I couldn't find any signs, startling two people inside. It turns out that the older of the two is chairman of the local nonprofit that manages the restored 1815-era house, and once he got started he enthusiastically gave me a detailed tour of the house, its new period-appropriate vegetable garden, and the collection of artifacts inside. I sweated through the tour for more than an hour and had a wonderful time. If you have any interest in history and restoration I recommend the Carman House.

In the mid-afternoon Penny Prius's dashboard told me it's time for her next scheduled service. The GPS was able to locate a Toyota dealer here in Bowmansville, east of Toronto, and a nearby Howard Johnson's where I arrived at 6 p.m., the hour I had intended to stop anyway. Penny has an 8 a.m. appointment tomorrow and we'll be back on the road.

The only aggravation today has been the two-lane Highway 401 expressway, reduced to one lane by paving work in several places with huge traffic backups. Also, Ontario 18-wheeler drivers are fond of taking 10 minutes or more to pass one another, creating a moving blockade a few km/hr below the speed limit. (Penny and the GPS both switch easily between miles and kilometers, so today and tomorrow we're metric.)