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Show We Cruised This family learned that inland traffic-free and leading to ne you sail upstream to just past Albany, you will come to a sign at a branch in the river. One arrow points to the left: “Erie Canal, Syracuse, and Buffalo, Speed Limit 10 mph.” Take this fork and you will wind up on Lake Erie. From there you can continue on to Chicago, and via the Illinois . > Vacationing family enjoys a rented, $2-foot houseb oat AST AUGUST mywife and I were traveling through the lovely dairy country of southern Vermont, I at the wheel and she looking at the scenery, when suddenly she exclaimed, “Look at that mag- nificent old elm.” “Where?” “Over there,” she said, “to starboard.” “Over there to starboard? What kind of nonsense is that in the landlocked state of Vermont?” River to the Mississippi. Then you can travel for 12,000 miles on a vast system of locks and channels from at Wilson Lake, Florence, Ala. with a buoyant basement with which down three steps behind them in the one tied it to a dock. But in the early kitchenette amidships was their mother, cooking on a gas stove. I 1960s a group of smart boat builders began to redesign the craft, and today the housepartsits on a ruggedly designed hull of stee!, aluminum, or fiber glass that’s often seaworthy enough for ocean trips and fast enough to tow water skiers. Basically, though,it’s not an ocean boat; the houseboat is to the conventional cruiser what the station wagon is to the sports car, and for ocean-going and fishing you can't beat the cruiser. It is in the inland waterways that the houseboat has appreciated road systems: the inland no peers. The reason is this: By sacrificing the conventional cruiser’s racy lines and its open sitting area astern, designers have crammed two to three times as much living space into a given iength of hull. They’ve widened the hull a few feet and used almostits entire length waterways. as a platform for an honest-to-good- It’s not so landlocked, though; in fact, we were just then in the process af floating past its west coast in a boat on our way from New York to Canada. Our highwaywasa twisting stretch of one of the country’s least- didn’t see the father, but I like to think he was asleep in one of the beds farther aft. Houseboat sales and rentals are now the fastest-growing segment of the booming pleasure-boat industry, and it will soon be as easy to rent a houseboat as a car. My boat, for instance, came from a national service called Rent-A-Cruise of America (Florence, Ala.) that works much like Hertz or Avis. It has about 500 boats at more than 800 locations around the country. The company provides everything you need, from charts to linens and kitchenware, so that all you have to bring aboard is your clothes. We could have goneto a local boatyard or marina, many of which keep a few houseboats strictly for rental purposes. In fact, these places are While we Americanstour the motor highwaysbythe tens of millions ev- ness, square-shaped house—equipped ery summer, only a relative handful unsurpassed and whoseextent is un- tenances as screen doors, picture windows,stall showers, and “queen-sized” studio beds. The result is that many of the craftlook, inside and out, as if they’d matched by any other waterway sys- been ripped loose from a Holiday Inn. atem in the world. Thoughit is actually a commercial system, built and maintained for The houseillusion is so strong that one night a departing guest on our every six months orso. In terms of person-per-day costs, a reuted-houseboat vacation isn’t as expensive as you might think. My 32-footer cost $325 a week (orslightly less in certain areas of the South, boat opened the front door, turned where the season is longer). If you barges and tankers, anyone with a to wave good-by to us, and walked boat can use it. And, thanks to a new kind of cruising vehicle, the house- into the river! boat, the trip can now be made in window of a 32-foot h b ata marina one rainy day last summer sums up the transformation. Spread out on the wall-to-wall carpeting of fill up all a boat’s beds and eat all your meals aboard,it will cost about the same per person as a sleepingi tels and eating-i of us know that the United States possesses a network of rivers and canals, whose wonderful beauty is the kind of comfort that’s usually associated with renting a cottage by a lake. Ten years ago a houseboat wasessentially nothing more than a house Family Weekly, May 18, 1969 with such blatantly houselike appur- A scene I saw through the picture the living-room ficor at the bow were three children playing a game, and multiplying so rapidly all over the country that Family Houseboating magazine, which tries to keep track of them, has to publish a new list car trip. Having rented the boat, the next Minneapolis, Minn., to Brownsville, Texas—all without stepping on dry land once. But instead, my wife and I took the right fork that led by canal, river, and Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence—from which additional endless mazes of Canadian waterways were available to us. So huge is the whole interlocking system—more than 30,000 miles—that if we were to spend the rest of our summers cruising it we would never have to pass the same point twice. Once waterborne, we quickly discovered what is probably the most compelling single fact about waterway touring: for long stretches, the America one sees tends, even today, to be an America untouched by the 20th century. For our civilization has developed mainly along the highways and railroads and has left the riversides to the farmer and the rich man’s great mansion. It’s true that we sailed through somehideously discolored water reeking of pollution and that sections of the shore line matched in industrial ugliness anything along the roads. But for hour after hour on the Hudson, we sailed past the old Dutch patroon country with stately chateaux presiding over baronial river views; past long, narrow stretches where the river is more like a creek and its banks are hidden by marshes full of red-wing blackbirds; past miles of rolling cow pastures with weathered-ced barns and white silos. The pace of river life, too, seems a throwback to a past century. Cruising at eight miles per hour (some boats cruise at more than 30 mph), we didn’t gauge our progress in problem was, where to go? The choices are many. From my home terms of miles per day but rather in hours traveled, scenery seen, sun bathed in, or fish caught. town of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., if Often the scenery was so overpow- |