Stephen driving the van, drove us all across the border into Vermont again.  This time almost half the group elected to start the ride from the base of the first big hill and ride to the top.  Anne and I were not among them.  We started at the top of the hill again and descended into Jay.  Jay is a ski town and as such it is pretty quite in the summertime.  It had a really nice general store, so Anne and I some gift shopping there.  I wonder for whom?  The general store had quite a nice collection of carved wood totems, bears, eagles, woodpeckers and the like.

The high point of the day was the lunch stop at Paddies’ in North Troy.  Stephen had briefed us all on the rules and etiquette of Paddies’, but I had forgotten them all by the time we got there.  I walked up to the food window only to order a desert, I called Pam, Patty, and I got scolded by a talking, animated deer head for sitting on the table of a park table and bench.  The great milkshake that I got there and the picturesque church steeple in the distance made this lunch stop memorable.

I was beginning to think that we would be doing all of biking in Vermont and I do believe that we did end up doing more biking in Vermont then in Quebec, when we came to the Canadian border.  We rode through customs on our bikes.  The afternoon turned hot and was punctuated by bee stings.  The recommended treatment, at least by the road crews was to rub the dirt of the land on the sting.  I stopped at a bank in Masonville to change some money and was first greeted by laughter and then sympathy from the bank tellers, I was tripping sweat.  They gave me cold water and Anne and I rode on to Lake Menphremagog, which had very warm water. We waded out into the lake.  We got twenty-nine miles.

After dinner, Jim Manson, a Champlain College professor, gave a talk on the history of French Quebec nationalism.  He was an ardent, passionate speaker, he had long, raven black hair and was rail thin.  By the end of his three hour lecture most of the group was asleep.  Anne and I were half of the still standing audience.