Enjoy!

June 5

We stayed an extra day in Campbellford and went on a hike to go back and see the lock we had traversed the day before, which is in the latest video,

a suspension bridge over a gorge,

and some waterfalls. 

Campbellford is a great little city – the hike was just the right length, and there were more beautiful views and interesting neighborhoods as we walked back to the boat. 

We enjoyed stopping a second time at the Stinking Rose pub to relax before boarding the boat, and making dinner.  Close to sunset, the river through town got glassy and gave us some great reflective shots.

So here we are, made it at last!  The trip across Lake Ontario was really easy since the water was very flat.  It took quite a while so I had time for a nap!  Once we were close to the shore, we went through a sailboat race, which you can see in the video.  I didn’t see anyone shaking a fist at us, but it was not clear sailing for a little while, since we have to give the right of way to sail boats.

Once we got through that hazard we were into a little canal and through some swing bridges.  The swing bridges were pretty neat – they wait until you get right up on them to swing through, and then at the first bridge the bridge keeper came out with a little brass cup on the end of an extendable pole to collect the $5 fee for passing through.  There was little to no wind, but I wondered what would happen if a strong breeze blew my money out of the cup!

It wasn’t long after that we came to the town of Trenton, in Ontario, where we are docking for at least the night.  We were surrounded by loopers at this marina, and they’d all come from different starting points, so Foster had fun chatting for a while.

We lucked out at this marina with an excellent wifi connection, but our prior experience has been that we have wifi about 30% of the time at marinas.  Sometimes the marina offers wifi but we can’t connect because the signal is too weak.  That was no biggie in the states since we used Foster’s me-fi, but international data is ridiculously expensive so we either have to rely on the marina, find a temporary me-fi here in Canada, or go without.

We cleared customs with no issues and then set off on some errands and exploration.  Foster exchanged money, we stopped at the tourist bureau to see what our options are, the liquor store to try some Canadian beers and wine, an interesting sort of dollar store/food store, and finally a very  nice asian restaurant called Thai Sushi where we drank Tsing Tao and Tiger beer, and ate some very good sushi.

Have some more posts to add, but also wanted to draw your attention to the updated gallery section.  There is a page with all the videos linked so you don’t have to search through posts to get to the video.  There’s also a lot more new photo galleries added!

We had decided to stay an extra day or two since we were having so much fun visiting the Cavalier family in Rochester, but Foster’s one caveat is that we plan something to do.  Visiting Niagara Falls has been on my list for a while, since I vaguely remember visiting as a small child.  My sister had to remind me that we went with our grandparents.  Since it was only about a 90 minute drive, we planned to go on Thursday.  The weather was a little cloudy to start out, but got beautiful not long after we arrived.

We crossed to the Canadian side and drove to the Skylon Tower to get the view from on high.  We had to get tickets first, and then went through one of those green screen photography areas.  Later we looked at our shots and the one where they photoshopped us into the barrel going over the falls was hilarious, but the price wasn’t funny at all!

I had decided to take the GoPro along with us and shoot video of our trip. The video is a little long, but there are some very interesting shots (video not loaded yet).

Skylon Towers  was a great intro to the falls area since we could easily see both the American falls and the Horseshoe falls from the tower.  We talked about what we’d like to do and decided to walk down to the falls on the Canadian side, then go back to the car and take the American side boat tour called Maid of the Mist rather than the Canadian boat since the Maid of the Mist seemed to go farther into the pool in front of the Horseshoe Falls.

We stopped for a quick lunch in the nearby casino and both had poutine which had a perfect melty texture to the cheese.

The sidewalk and visitor area overlooking the Horseshoe Falls area provided a great view.  The water had a really cool green tinge to it as it approached the edge of the rocks

We managed to find our way back to the American side and got waved into a cheesy tourist parking spot, and as directed walked inside for our “free map” and free hard sell on the guided tour.  It wasn’t a hard decision to conduct our own tour, since the guided tour was more than four times the cost of the Maid of the Mist tickets, and everything else was free within the state park!

Once we got our tickets, we crossed to the tall elevator and rode down to the loading area.  I ran the GoPro, getting some great shots as we got onto the tour boat and went into the mist.  I really appreciated the free rain ponchos that they give out as part of the fare, since the mist from the falls was literally raining down onto us when we got all the way into the depths of of the falls.  It was a pretty spectacular ride.  The force of the water created a lot of mist and whirlpools at the base of the falls.

After the ride was over we walked to the viewing area on the American side and got some more good shots.  The day was so beautiful we continued to walk upriver until we came to a bridge that overlooked rapids that lead up to the American falls.

A great day!  Look in the Photo Gallery for more shots from Niagara.

Welcome to the Erie Canal!   May 14 – May 23

Here’s the latest theme song, courtesy of my sister Michele.

The Erie Canal has been very interesting because of the lock systems we have to go through every day.  This leg of the trip has been much more demanding because of the locks – as we come in to a lock, I have to catch a line using a boat hook, and then secure the line to a cleat so Foster can swing the back of the boat around and we can secure the back as well.  It’s not as simple as just tying off the boat, however, since the water will go up or down in the lock and we have to feed the line and keep the boat against the side of the lock.  Our first few locks were very easy, and then we had a couple of very difficult ones that kept us on our toes.  We now have a routine down, so we have a good idea of what we’re doing, it just takes some communication, coordination, and physical effort.  Here’s a video of our first day doing multiple locks.

The next day, we had a tough day of doing 8 locks (only missed filming one on the video) and thought we were going to be settled down for a while in St. Johnsville, NY due to heavy rains coming in and the locks being shut down to control the water flow.  First thing in the morning, however, the dockmaster let us know that the lock people wanted us to move up as far as we could – above lock #20 if possible – due to the way the weather system was behaving.   Given how fast our boat can run, and the availability of marinas along the way, we compromised by doing another 6 hour run.  This included 3 locks, one of which was in the pouring rain which you can literally see coming down at the end of the video.  Fortunately it wasn’t too cold, because we were completely soaked at the end of the day.  The windows in the boat were completely steamed up.

The happy result of moving at the last minute was that we got to spend nearly a week in Ilion, NY,  a very small town that conveniently had everything we needed within a mile or so of the marina.  We also had a great little hot dog and hamburger place called Voss’s BarBQ about 5 steps away from our pilot house.  They make their own ice cream, so we were set for the week!  I got another great shot of the dawn the day after the rain:

Once the locks reopened and we were happy with the way the wind and the current had settled down, we set off again and had a long 8 hour day of travel.  The locks went very well, and we had our first experience with down locks.  I like the down locks better so far, but don’t want to count on them always being so easy!  This video has the down locks, as well as beautiful views of the canal, like this:

In the video you can also see some of the tugs and barges we passed on the canal like this one:

We made it all the way across Lake Oneida and are settled in again for a few days in Brewerton, NY waiting for weather and some minor repairs to be completed. Once again, we have some beautiful views – here is last night’s sunset:

And here is my little duck buddy from this morning:

I love the Hudson River.  Having grown up in Northwestern Connecticut in a tiny town called Litchfield, we travelled all around the area and I had seen the Hudson many times.  As a small child, my parents went on a weekend trip with us on a houseboat up part of the Hudson.  As a result, I was really looking forward to this part of the river.  I wasn’t really thrilled when we left Croton-on-Hudson because it was so foggy.  For the first hour or so we didn’t see much of the scenery.  After that, the mist settled a bit and we were provided the perfect view, just as I remember it as a child and young adult.   The video came out pretty well.  The theme song Michele provided was very appropriate – by Over the Rhine. There are so many things we passed along the river that were really neat, like Sing Sing prison, the Culinary Institute of America, West Point, and lots of cool looking tiny little towns.

Bear Mountain Bridge

Sing Sing Prison

Waterfall along the Hudson

The first night we stopped in Newburgh, and one of my longtime friends, Deirdre, who I had not seen in more than 15 years joined us for an overnight.  We had a great time catching up, and then went to see OC Choppers show room.  The next day, we went to see a really cool museum called Motorcyclepedia which had over 450 exhibits.  Definitely a fun side trip.  In the morning we had beautiful weather, and I walked up the steep hill to the Newburgh Post Office.  Once we got back it was off to Kingston NY.  Here’s the video.

Kingston is a great little town that has several nice restaurants and shops, as well as a couple of museums.  We visited the Hudson River Maritime Museum which had lots of pretty fascinating exhibits.  Next we hopped on a trolley and rode to the Trolley museum, which had many antique trolleys in various stages of restoration, and an interesting exhibit hall.  We had dinner at an irish pub in town, and I enjoyed my fish and chips.

Kingston, NY

Leaving Kingston the next morning, we again had great weather and traveled to New Baltimore NY to a marina called Shady Harbor.  This marina was super organized and had a great little restaurant on site that could provide either fine dining or great pizza. The next day, Foster promised me a day off, and the marina kindly allowed us to borrow a car to do some grocery shopping.   We got a quick look at the surrounding area which was nice, not very developed at all. Sadly, the video suffered from a user error and we didn’t get the last half, which is sad because we missed Bannerman’s Castle!

Bannerman’s Castle

Sunrise at Shady Harbor

Our trip the next day was again great weather, and brought us to our first lock experience at the Troy NY lock.  We managed to capture the whole trip this time on video.  We docked at Waterford NY where the Erie canal starts, and wandered off to check out the next lock from a pedestrian’s point of view.  Later, we took a quick picture at the Angry Penguin, and then I had really fabulous Shepherd’s Pie for dinner at McGrievey’s.  Before we started off the next day, we made sure to have breakfast at a highly recommended coffee shop called Don and Paul’s before continuing on our way across the Erie Canal.

Waterford, NY

Waterford Marina

I’ll try and get caught up over the next couple of days.  There are lots of pictures, and at some point Foster would like to add a gallery option.  We’re trying to load blog entries on the actual date we do something, so look back through entries if you feel like you’ve missed something.

I’ll be honest with you all – this is a lot of work!  Yeah, I know, cry me a river.  There are sometimes over a hundred pictures in a day.  Many of them are blurry (hard to take a good shot on a rocking boat) and others just need work like adjusting lighting or contrast, cropping, identifying what the shot is of, and researching if you don’t know immediately, adding a caption, resizing for optimum page loads, etc.  Just choosing which shots to add this morning has been about 45 minutes and I’m not done yet.  Maybe as we move along there will be less picture-worthy landscape going by but I doubt it.

Then there are the videos.  Every day we move, we shoot time lapse video for the length of the trip that day.  If I have properly charged the batteries, changed them at appropriate intervals, and not screwed up starting or restarting the time lapse, that results in 3-4 clips and about an hour or 90 minutes of editing time.  Once the video is edited and an mp4 file created, it takes around an hour to upload to YouTube, provided we have a good internet connection.  If my laptop gets closed or times out, the upload stops.

With that said, if you don’t see something from me every day, don’t panic!  I’ve more than likely got behind on my processing and will catch up as soon as possible.  If I get too far behind I get cranky because it interferes with other things that I want to do, like taking a nap.

Here’s a link to our YouTube channel;  it may make it easier for those of you who enjoy the videos since you won’t need to wait for me to post a blog entry.

QV Marine YouTube Channel

For the rest of the day we had a bit of a breeze, but so many great sights to see!  We could see the skyline of New York from quite far out.  The buildings in Manhattan are very distinctive from a distance.

As we passed the Staten Island Ferry, I thought about visiting our friends there – Arthur! – but we were busy navigating toward our marina.

As you can see we had some great views of Lady Liberty as we approached the entrance to the harbor.

We were both amazed to see a large sailboat dodging ferries and Circle Line while smack dab in NY Harbor.

We finally settled in our marina, on the New Jersey side, and got ourselves set up for a little tourism.  Here’s a link to the video of this leg of the trip.

We walked over to the Liberty State Park where we could catch a ferry for Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.  I was most interested in Ellis Island – sadly a lot of their exhibits were not available because the power plant was still not functioning after Hurricane Sandy, and they weren’t able to provide the proper environment to preserve the exhibits on site.

There was a huge line to get on the ferry back to New York, but not for the ferry back to New Jersey.  We hopped on the NJ side and rode over to the Statue of Liberty, and then switched ferries to get on the New York ferry.

Once we got to NY we found our way to Chinatown to eat some delicious Xiao Long Bao – Chinese soup dumplings that I read about on Serious Eats.  We were really glad they gave us a how to on eating the dumplings so we didn’t end up with a bite of scalding hot soup splurting everywhere!  The dumplings were delicious as promised.

After Chinatown we made our way home to our Marina at Liberty Landing, via ferry, which is an experience itself!

We left very early, right at 7am, in order to take advantage of the calm.  It was perfectly calm as you can see in the video and in the title picture of the water looking like glass. 

Fishing boat just outside of Atlantic City, NJ 5/3/14

The trip was uneventful until we arrived at Hoffman’s Marina when the wind picked up a bit.  We stopped at the fuel dock for a pump out and then docked in our space right next to the train bridge.  I hardly notice it anymore, but the bridge sounds a siren every time it needs to close for a train.  Which is often.

Open train drawbridge, Manasquan NJ 5/4/14

Closed train drawbridge, Manasquan NJ 5/4/14

We really enjoyed Utsch’s Marina and our few days at Cape May, even though several of them were rainy.  We needed a little break from the bustle of getting ready.  We had a chance to see the antique dredger pictured on Foster’s post at work Thursday evening, and I also got a nice sunset picture.

Sunset at Utsch’s Marina, 5/1/14

On Friday morning, per our plan, we got ready to leave for Atlantic City by pulling up to the fuel dock and refueling before heading out.  The waves were a little rocky and I made the mistake of starting out in the salon, which gave me my first case of seasickness on the QV!  After sitting up on the bridge for a while, I felt better.  You can see some of the rocking in the video, which is a very quick one since battery number2 on the GoPro was insufficiently charged and only lasted for 15 minutes.

We pulled in to Kammerman’s Marina in Atlantic City relatively early around 12:45.  Had time to take a picture of Wee Kilted Pig before I got bit by some nasty big unknown bug.

Wee Kilted Pig upon arrival in Atlantic City, NJ

Straightened up just a little for a visit from a local friend, Lisa, who kindly dropped us off at the Atlantic City Marina for our sight seeing tour. 

After the aquarium we sat for drinks at a nearby place and tried to decide where to celebrate my 51^st birthday.  We ended up at Dock’s Oyster House, which was extremely good.  Service was also excellent.  Got a pretty sunset picture before we turned in early and I was up early as usual, to get some nice pre-dawn and dawn shots.

Sunset in Atlantic City, NJ 5/2/14

View of Atlantic City from Kammerman’s Marina just before dawn 5/3/14

View of Atlantic City from Kammerman’s Marina at dawn 5/3/14

Dawn in Atlantic City, NJ Kammerman’s Marina 5/3/14