September 14
6AM came awfully fast.
The skies were gray and the pavement was wet.
I flipped on the weather channel and found that our slow-moving front was still alive, but was coughing up blood. It was raining in New York, but the forecast was for sunny skies and mild temperatures all the way to Maine by tomorrow morning. ""Yeah, ya been saying that for three days", I muttered, and flipped the TV off.
Rob had a 7:30 tee time, and had to be on the road by 7. Eric and I said our goodbyes and hung around the house a little longer, not leaving till 7:45. Rob had warned us about Toronto traffic, and told us to stay out of the city for as long as we could as we headed north. There were some farm roads that were a bit out of town but still headed in the right direction, so we stayed on them long enough to get east of the city, where we could drop down to the 401 while avoiding rush-hour traffic. Sitting at a stoplight in some little town, I saw a flock of Canada geese, forming up for their flight south. We would be doing the same thing soon.
We ran into the rain about an hour down the road. It rained on us the rest of the day.
We crossed back into the US on I-81, at Ten Thousand Islands, where the St. Lawrence Seaway meets the Great Lakes. Our border crossing was wet, but uneventful. As we crossed the high, narrow bridge back into the US, I really wished that the weather had been better. This is a gorgeous area. The waterway below was dotted with little rocky, wooded islands, with cabins and docks and boathouses everywhere. This would be a great place to come back and explore sometime.
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About 2:30, we arrived at Watertown, New York. We stopped at a Bob Evans and had lunch. Still raining. We had both had bad cell coverage in Canada, so we spent a little extra time at the table returning calls. I called a buddy back in Panama City who I figured would be in front of a computer. He was, so I had him check the forecast and radar for several cities to the east. It was going to rain the rest of the day, and it still might rain a little tomorrow. This front just didn't want to die.
It was getting close to 4 by the time we finished our meals and calls, and we decided to call it a short day. There was a brand-new Holiday Inn Express just down the way, calling our names. We took a swim in the supposedly-heated pool (could have fooled me!), I went for a jog while Eric hit the sauna. Eric wasn't hungry that night, so I had dinner by myself at a Golden Corral a few steps away.
Only about 245 miles today.