Bob and I left David at the rail station at Syracuse, a large city (by our standards) in upstate New York, and once satisfied that he had a ticket for his train to Boston, we hit the road – Cruisin’ in our PT Cruiser.

With another spaghetti junction to negotiate, we headed north on Route 81 to Watertown, a distinctly un-Australian town on the edge of Lake Ontario, with rivers and smaller lakes everywhere around. We rang our friend just outside Burlington, Vermont to let them know our location and approximate ETA – they were surprised at our route, which would be slow across the Adirondack Mountains on the New York side of Lake Champlain.

Although we were keen for a coffee and lunch, Bob was particularly keen to get on the correct route out of town before we fuelled up. This led us out of town before we knew it, into a flat country of poor housing and sustenance agricultural farming. It was amazing to see the clutches of settlements of trailers and relocatable homes in this cold, cold climate with little or no effective insulation.

Soon we hit [insert town here] the gateway to the Adirondacks’, a glorious little town over running streams and rivers, sweet little Guesthouses next to the babbling brooks and a bakery. We took photos, but did not waste time investigating otherwise, hitting the road once more. The countryside grew increasingly interesting, although the options for food and coffee were non existent. We eventually stopped at a service station with an attached small supermarket, where we were so desperate we had a couple of Styrofoam (always Styrofoam) cups of vacuum pump coffee. The plainest version (the others were all flavoured), stil had an unpleasant sweetness and flavour to it as though a hazelnut blend was being used. This definitely was not what we were after! A loaf of very ordinary, too sweet ‘wholegrain’ bread was lunch spread with vegemite (yum) and some left over hoummous while we were driving.

We took a shortcut through an Army Base [Fort ?] to bypass the town of [insert name], which explained the plethora of ancient army trucks (WWII vintage from the looks of them) which passed us, and the bevy of camouflaged fatigue outfitted men that were congregating around the gas station.

The mountains grew increasingly beautiful, and the remnants of the Fall colours peppered the mountainside with rich burgundy, bright golds and the evergreen richness of pines. As the mountains climbed, the affluence of the district grew until we reached the winter playground of Lake Placid, were an annual Ironman Triathlon is held, and is the base of the US winter ski team. The GPS navigator had directed us onto secondary raods around the towns as a quicker route, and although twisting and turning, were completely quite and unimaginably beautiful. A small lake demanded that we stop alongside in an attempt to capture the beauty in a photo. [insert photo here] The picture cannot do it justice.

Soon, we were descending the mountain into the lakeside town of [insert name] where we were to decide whether to turn a little to the north and catch the car ferry across Lake Champlain into Vermont, or turn south to drive out of New York into Vegennes across a bridge. We calculated that we would just miss the ferry, so headed southwards along the edge of the lake as the most enormous hunter’s moon rose in the east. It was a gobsmacking sight.

Dusk fell as we rolled into Vegennes on the border, where we filled up with petrol at a small local gas station and were keen to hot foot it up the highway to our friends place. There was no mobile phone coverage, and keen to advise them of our delayed arrival time and for Bob to call his sister at the first available opportunity we kept our mobile phones at the ready and were checking constantly over the course of the journey. Turning from one monor road onto a major State and then Interstate road, and rolling through towns we were sure that it would pick up a signal somewhere; but no dice. I had checked on the mobile phone coverage with different carriers before I left Australia and remember that of those I looked at (Virgin,T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T) all were poor at best in Vermont. I didn’t expect it to be non-existant.

A warm welcome and great meal of salad and crab cakes, baked salmon and apple pastry awaited us when we eventually arrived. The bright red tones of the maples had already gone from the district when we arrived, but the blanket of autumnal leaves and the forest was still very beautiful. We were to be somewhat technologically challenged however, especially having been spoilt to date with widespread Free WiFi access on the bulk of our journey thus far. A shared dial-up access with a business phone limited our internet access to nil. No cell phone coverage has prevented communication, and our search around the Burlington (the most populous city) on a heavily raining afternoon on Saturday resulted in no luck in seeking a wireless spot, apart from Starbucks which associated expenses for a days access.