Vermont
I crossed the border at Champlain, New York and then immediately rode into Vermont. It’s an interesting thing for a California boy to see towns with signs saying “chartered 1780.” We don’t have much of anything on the west coast older than 100 or so years. I though the northeastern towns might remind me of Europe, but they really didn’t. They looked and felt distinctly American.
I had about an hour of sunshine, then stopped at a restaurant when the first raindrops started. There were a couple of guys from New Hampshire on a weekend ride, and an older bicyclist on a cross-country trip. I started talking to them, and we all ended up eating lunch together. The bicyclist’s name is Ben Johnson, he’s 74 years old and he’s riding his bicycle 100 days cross-country by himself, starting in Washington state and ending at Bar Harbor, Maine. We were laughing about how he had to stop in at a country doctor’s office to weigh himself, to convince his wife that he was eating well and not losing weight. What a cool guy.
Then the rain started. I don’t know if it had anything to do with the tropical storms that have been hitting the entire country, but I have never, ever, seen such hard rain. There were huge pools of water covering the road in so many places. The only reason I didn’t stop at a hotel is because I had a reservation in Boston. Next time I’ll just stop, because it was a miserable ride.