Rideau - Kingston - Clayton Ny

July 21

The Rideau

I thought I would open this post with a smile.....

The water temperature could not have been more perfect.

The Rideau Canal is the tail of two rivers.  The upper portion was highlighted by magnificent homes with luxurious lawns and big boats.  The lower portion remained largely undeveloped yielding endless vistas that reflect what settlers saw hundreds of years ago.

The pictures really don't do it justice.  It was beautiful for days on end.

We did stop at multiple towns staying on the lock walls.  Each town had it's charm and color.  For example, Merrickville had the "Canada's Best Gelato" (and it just might have been at that) with a live band for your eating pleasure.

In Westport, I got my first "butter tart".  So what is a butter tart? Glad you asked;

From Wiki: A butter tart (French: tarte au beurre) is a type of small pastry tart highly regarded in Canadian cuisine. The sweet tart consists of a filling of butter, sugar, syrup, and egg, baked in a pastry shell until the filling is semi-solid with a crunchy top.^[1] The butter tart should not be confused with butter pie (a savoury pie from the Preston area of Lancashire, England) or with bread and butter pudding.

These things are looper legend with whole festivals planned around them.  Cathy on Never Home bought some and shared.  Let me tell you, they are worthy of the accolades.   

I will say that swimming with a belly full of this confectionery goodness is not the best of ideas.

For the home town crowd, we saw this pub in this town ....  How funny:

(For everyone else, Rob Roy is a neighbor in Kilmarnock.)

Well, we finished the Rideau at Kingston Ca.  We only stayed one night to re-provision and took off for the Thousand Islands.  We stopped in Clayton NY which is part of the island chain.  Ir felt great to be back on US soil.  After dinner with the Never Home crew, we ended up with half of the marina on our boat for cocktails, laughs and tall tails.  What a blast.  I actually didn't know the boat would hold that many people.  This was only half the crowd.  People just kept coming.

Today is a little "foggy".  Atillio from Never Home surrendered the day to his pillow.  

Funny Notes:

To close with a couple of funnies....

First, you can never totally trust the electronics.  Suffice it to say that I did not use auto pilot on this segment (and no, the boat is not amphibious).  If you don't know what is wrong with this picture, you can't drive the boat!  Hint: I was actually in the middle of the channel.

Second; The boat continues to get tons of attention.  I am pretty sure I have sold two or three for Aspen at this point.  However, some of the interested parties are quite aggressive about it.  One gentleman tracked us on Nebo and coordinated his trip to coincide with our trip down the Rideau.  He waited at the end of one lock and when we passed through he asked if we would show it to his wife.    We did.  He asked to buy the boat from us right then but was willing to wait until we finished the loop.    

Then, when we got to Kingston yesterday, we woke up and found this note on our back deck:

Mind you, this is a completely different guy that we had never met.  He showed up later that afternoon right before we took off and I didn't think we were going to get him to leave.  He had read everything he could on the boat and came full of questions.  He too was willing to wait until we finished the loop ...  

And finally, for those reading this that are considering the trip and wondering what is the ideal boat ... the answer is simple ... The one you have.  Walking down the dock I was surprised to see the GOLD loop flag on this bad boy indicating that they had completed the loop. (If you zoom in you can see it is on the bow but wrapped to keep if from making noise at night.) Talking with them, they did the entire trip on this thing.  They did say they thought they might go down on Lake Michigan when 3 foot waves on a 3 second period almost swamped them.

The point being, almost any vessel can make the trip.  (Note to Dennis:  I do believe Paige would prefer "The Other Woman"!  LOL).

Take care and stay safe.

With Love,

 

Terri and Aubrey