Today is the day we start to head south out of Canada for the winter.  With all of our research done, US Immigration webpage checked to see what food can cross over the border and a list of all our wine and alcohol onboard.  The reason for the “list” was because we  had spent so much time in wine country we accumulated a lot of wine!  So, we were over our limit.  Oh well, off to the border we headed.  We headed east out of Ottawa and turned south at Montreal and headed down towards Vermont.  We arrived at the Canada US border with a little bit of nervous jitters as we have never before taken our house across an International border.  There was only one car in front of us when we pulled up.   We were asked a few questions, for our passports and registration for the motorhome and after handing them over along with the list of alcohol and meat that we had on board we were asked to pull over and come inside.  We could hear them discussing the overage of wine and was it worth doing the paperwork for the duty of $5.00!  After a couple of minutes they came out of their office and handed us all our papers and said “enjoy our trip”.  No duty needed!  We were pulling out of the border area 17 minutes after we entered it.   We now have crossed over to the other side!

Our first stop in the US was in Barre, Vermont.  Since it is now November we could not find any campground that was still open so we needed to get a room at the Comfort Inn.  We unloaded June’s motorbike and drove into town to the Rock of Ages  Granite Quarry.  This is one of the sights we were told we needed to see by our US friends in our wonderful book that they gave us in the spring.  It was cold, just above freezing and the visitors centre and quarry tours were closed for the year but we were there!

The next morning we woke up and drove back north about ten miles to the Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream Factory and took a private tour.

Private because we were the only two there!  After learning on how they make their wonderful ice cream we received a sample at the end of the tour.   That was certainly not enough, so we had to get an additional taste of 3 other flavours. Our next destination was Bellingham, MA, south west of Boston.

We arrived mid afternoon and got set up and some grocery shopping done before Larry’s Aunt Ruth and Uncle Terry arrived with a pizza from Uno Pizzeria.  We had a wonderful evening visiting in our home.  There were a  few different options for what to do around Bellingham but, unfortunately the weather was not favourable to go for a long motorcycle ride so we got on our bicycles

and had a nice ride through the neighbouring countryside through the rolling hills. The next day we did more exploring by bicycle through the neighbouring villages.  Our last morning we woke up to freezing temperatures so, once again it was time to move on!