Countryside near Mosquitoville, Vermont

Well, we're home and settling in to an altered reality. The cat is really lonely and there are lots of things to catch up on.

Miles: We went 691 miles on our big loop, didn't do the loop we planned since we went up into Canada and came back on the Northeast side of Vermont. Our biggest day was a 65-miler, and the shortest a 23-mile day. The average day was about 43 miles.

Route: The actual route is now posted, and you can see that we didn't go west of Vermont's fabulous Northeast Kingdom, but we did go up into Quebec as far as Magog.

Finances: Our financial goal was to live on $40/day ($20/person/day). We rode 17 days. The actual numbers came out to $42/day, but we had many days that were far higher. And all of the very low days were a result of other kind people (family and strangers) taking care of us. So our actual numbers probably weren't real. We probably need to budget at least $30/day/person for North American touring, perhaps more. You can compare the finances to the writeup from our Northwest and Mexico trips. There were many days where we might have spent $20 for a campground had some kind person not taken us in. And although we paid for two nights in B&B's, we had many other comfortable nights with old and new friends. We stayed 10 nights in people's homes. Only 5 of those nights were with relatives!

Weight: We didn't gain any weight and didn't lose any weight. It was pretty cushy riding, low miles and lots of good food.

Bike Maintenance: We should have had our bikes in a little better condition. I should have put a new chain on mine before starting. Nancy needed new derailleur cables - one actually broke near Gorham, New Hampshire. And I had a freehub break into little pieces. I probably couldn't have anticipated or prevented that. Next time: New chains, cables, and housing before starting out.

Cool people: I don't think we could ever expect (or should expect in the future) to run into that many kind people that would be so generous. But it's a treat to see it. We spent 10 nights in people's homes, and five of those were with people we'd never met before, who just invited us in off the street!

Weather: We had fairly good weather. Lots more easy days than hard. I suppose that on some of the 3-4 really rainy days we were wishing for it to stop. It did suddenly get significantly colder the day we hit Colebrook, New Hampshire, and it's nice that we had such easy accomodations after that point (we didn't camp any more after that!)