Greetings from Hog Island.
I’m up early this morning, watching the sun rise across Lake Champlain from our balcony at the Tabor House Inn in Swanton, Vermont (where we enjoyed a lovely dinner, and peaceful night’s sleep in a most comfortable bed). My sweetheart Marilyn, who’s on vacation this week, is still occupying that bed, missing out on a beautiful, ephemeral sunrise view. I think I wore her out on the tandem bike yesterday.
It’s been cloudy and rainy over the northeast for most of the last month or so (or so it seems), so the sun is a welcome visitor on this early-summer morning. Even at sunrise, however, there’s a riffle on the lake from the breeze—which may not bode well for my plans later in the day. (I’m hoping to paddle across the lake to our next overnight). But for now it’s very, very pleasant.
If you’d seen us driving north yesterday morning, you’d have known in an instant that we were on vacation and intending to have fun outdoors. Either that, or we were doing our best to look like the Beverly Hillbillies. We have three bikes on the car—hers, mine and our big red tandem. Plus, I have my 17-foot, bright red sea kayak—kinda hard to miss.
Yesterday was a biking day. The sky was cloudy and gray, the wind fairly howling out of the north—not a good day for paddling. But, on our way north we had to pass right near St. Albans, which is the start of the Missisquoi Valley Rail Trail. From there it winds its way 26.4 miles northeast to the town of Richford, Vermont, right on the Canadian border.
Marilyn’s favorite outdoor pastime spring, summer and fall is riding our fat-tire tandem bike, and there’s no place she’d rather ride than on a rail trail. The Missisquoi is a beauty with a smooth, packed gravel surface and easy grades. It runs mostly through stunningly bucolic Vermont countryside with farm fields and pastures, occasionally small towns. Enosburg Falls at mile 16.5 is a perfect spot to stop for lunch. If your riding partner doesn’t happen to be a nutrition counselor who is concerned about your cholesterol numbers, there’s a wonderful spot for soft-serve ice cream cones (they call them “creemees” in Vermont) a few miles beyond Enosburg Falls. Unfortunately we had other stops to make. Sigh.
That last third of the trip has Jay Peak looming in your sights as you pedal beside the Missisquoi River. You can watch it get closer with each turn of the pedals.
Eventually, the Missisquoi Valley Rail Trail will be extended to the nearby Canadian Border, where it will connect with Quebec’s Route Verte—an extensive network of bicycle paths and bike lanes that crisscrosses the entire Province. There are also plans in the works to build the connecting Lamoille Valley Rail Trail, which will eventually run 92 miles from Swanton to St. Johnsbury. The Vermont Association of Snow Travelers, a statewide snowmobile club is spearheading this effort. Hooray for them!
Even without those additional enticements, the Missisquoi Rail Trail is worth visiting. If 53 miles is too much for you to ride in a day, take a couple of days, stay somewhere on Lake Champlain—there are quiet B&B’s, inexpensive motels and campgrounds all around here. Make an active vacation of it.
More Than Moving Along The Missisquoi Valley Rail TrailIslands and Rail Lines
The other great bike path in this neighborhood in the Island Line Rail Trail which runs 12 miles along the waterfront from Oakledge Park just south of Burlington north to Colchester and out, literally across the mouth of Malletts Bay on a causeway made of huge limestone blocks.
We’ve ridden this several times, once on solo hybrid bikes we rented from Local Motion in Burlington and once on our tandem. As far as I’m concerned, the 5-mile causeway section may be the best summer-morning bike ride in New England (though I can think of a couple of seaside rides that come close)
Most of the time, you have to stop at what’s called “The Cut” a 200-foot gap in the causeway left when a bridge was removed (I’m not sure whether it was by man or Mother Nature—the wind and ice out there must be fierce in the winter . . .) In August, on weekends, they run a bike ferry across the cut, which allows you to ride all the way into South Hero and farther on the Champlain Islands if you so desire.
Our timing has never been right to catch the ferry across, but we have ridden out to it from the South Hero side—shorter ride, but beautiful on a summer morning.