We woke up at our usual reasonable time of about 8:45 and performed our preparations for departure. We were fed, packed up and exiting the park before 11:00. Vermont is pretty rustic with few roads going anywhere other than directly between towns, most of them single lane each way, but they are wide enough to accommodate our Charlotte towing the enormous Barbarian Invader without terrifying the driver or his passenger, Peg. The roads are well maintained and we made pretty good time despite the unnaturally low speed limits. Very few places have speed limits above 45 miles per hour but we were happy to trudge along and admire the spectacular scenery of this state.
Someone told us that Charles Kuralt, who used to have a segment on a Sunday morning news show, stated that the U.S. interstate system was a network of roads where you could drive coast-to-coast without seeing anything on the way. In most cases, we would have to agree but we found a spectacular exception. Approaching Rutland, VT, we entered U.S. Highway 4 which is the most stunningly gorgeous freeway drive either of us has ever traveled. It is a two lane each way road with a median so wide you frequently cannot see the traffic going the other way. The road has ever-changing vistas, gently rolling emerald green hills, nice wide lanes and very limited access making for a very pleasant drive into New York.
However, as soon as you cross into New York state at Whitehall, the roads immediately turn to potholed, narrow tracks with signage that would confuse even the locals. We turned north on either Hwy 22 or 9N (we could not tell which) that snakes along the east side of Lake Champlain. This route, although marked as RV friendly in our handy Good Sam Club atlas, is a terrifying assortment of narrow, twisting alleys liberally punctuated with sunken grades, oncoming drivers unaccustomed to driving in their lane and sinuous pathways through riverside communities that consider road maintenance bothersome so they leave it undone. After more of this than either of us wanted, we finally emerged from the zone of horror onto I-87, a well-maintained, excellent freeway quite unlike any roads we have experienced in our NY travels. We picked up I-87 at exit 35 and only followed it to exit 37 where we exited to our new campsite in Peru, NY. The new place is called Iroquois Campground and it is really quite nice. It has full hook-ups but there is no TV and the wi-fi is extremely shaky. The campground, however, is very pretty and situated in a nice grove of trees with good roads although they have some nasty intentional speed bumps so drivers are obliged to slow down from 3 mph to 2 mph. It is very quiet. The silence was a panacea for our shattered nerves from NY rural transit.