GL: Letitia's trip through Canada

[Elliott Bray]

Letitia is just about to take us through our last days in Canada for this
year.

We left White Lake on Lake Michigan on June 7 for the North Channel,
Georgian Bay and the Trent-Severn.
We are now docked at Confederation Marina in Kingston, ON. Tomorrow we'll go
down and across the St. Lawrence to Clayton, NY and finish the Canadian
portion of our trip for the summer.

Traffic was down everywhere we went. The numbers I kept hearing were
something like 30%. For those of us that are tourists, that number may be a
little misleading. Several lock/dock tenders (on the T-S) commented that it
was the local traffic that was really way down, that where in past years Joe
and family hopped in the boat and went thru the lock to the next ice cream
stop, the now drove the car. The dockmaster at Trenton said that while the
number of large boats was down, it was the little guys that felt the fuel
price more. The weather added to the slow down. Once we got out of Georgian
Bay it seemed to rain daily - felt like Louisiana (except wonderfully cool).

I can't say enough about taking your time through the T-S. I remember when
we came through in 2005 we counted up days and said '... The seasonal pass
breaks even at 11 days, we'll never use that many and paid for dockage by
the night.' Wrong attitude we discovered!!  We were on the T-S for 32 days.
We spent 9 days in marinas and 22 tied up to various lock approach walls
(there were times when the 'call of the power cord' just got too strong -
usually when the laundry pile got too tall). When we got to Lock 6 -
Frankfort where the city had installed power pedestals we stayed 3 nights.

We kept commenting about how much we had missed the first time through.

We'll come back again - 98 in Austin vs 73 in Kingston...



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Elliott Bray
M/V Letitia - Gulfstar 44 MC
www.loopcruiser.com
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