New York: Clayton – Wooden Boat Inn

🗺️ Where on Earth Are We? The Thousand Islands Region

The Thousand Islands region sits right at the very top of New York State, which is about as far north as you can get before Canada quietly annexes you. This is where the mighty St Lawrence River begins its long journey out of Lake Ontario, heading off towards the North Atlantic — which, trust me, is every bit as frigid and unwelcoming as it sounds. The border between the United States and Canada runs straight through the middle of both Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence River, which means you can be in two countries more or less simultaneously, which is either geographically interesting or completely pointless depending on your outlook. The St Lawrence has been a vital waterway for centuries — Indigenous peoples like the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe travelled and fished these waters long before Europeans showed up uninvited in the early 1600s. Jacques Cartier sailed the river in 1534 and 1535, and the French, ever the optimists, thought this was their route to the Orient. It wasn’t. Still, the river became the commercial backbone of colonial North America, and the Thousand Islands — all 1,864 of them, apparently someone counted — were eventually carved into one of the most scenic stretches of waterway on the continent.

🏘️ Clayton, New York — Surprisingly Decent

We wanted to spend a couple of days properly exploring the area, so we decided to base ourselves in the small town of Clayton, New York, which sits right on the southern bank of the St Lawrence River. Clayton has been a river town since the early nineteenth century, when it served as a hub for fishing, boat-building, and the timber trade. By the late 1800s it had reinvented itself as a summer resort for the well-heeled, which is when a lot of the rather handsome Victorian architecture in the historic district was built. These days it’s a proper tourist town in the warmer months — busy but not insufferably so.

And honestly, Clayton was quite lovely. The historic district has a decent selection of bars and restaurants covering most budgets and tastes, which is all anyone really asks of a small American town, isn’t it. There are also a number of small boutique shops doing a brisk trade with the steady stream of tourists who descend on the place from spring through to autumn. It has that particular quality of a town that knows exactly what it is and has made peace with it, which is rather refreshing.

🌅 The Waterfront — Sit Down, Do Nothing, Feel Fine About It

The waterfront at Clayton is genuinely one of those places where you can simply stop. Walk along it, sit on a bench, watch the river do its thing, and feel like you’ve earned a rest even if you haven’t done very much. The St Lawrence at this point is wide and unhurried, dotted with islands, and if you time it right the sunsets are absolutely spectacular — the kind that make you feel briefly philosophical before you remember you’re hungry. The waterfront has clearly been smartened up in recent decades, and it’s all the better for it.

⛵ The Antique Boat Museum — Better Than It Sounds

There is also a small, working harbour with a busy boatyard, which reminded us that Clayton still has genuine maritime bones to it, not just gift shops. And right there at the harbour you’ll find the Antique Boat Museum, which — and I say this as someone with absolutely no natural interest in boats — is genuinely worth your time. Opened in 1964, the museum is dedicated to the preservation of wooden watercraft that were built and used on the St Lawrence and the Great Lakes. The collection spans over three centuries of boatbuilding history, from Indigenous birchbark canoes to the magnificent mahogany launches and gleaming runabouts that the Gilded Age millionaires used to zip between their island castles in the early 1900s. The craftsmanship on some of these vessels is extraordinary — the kind of careful, painstaking work that makes you feel vaguely inadequate about your own life choices. You’ll come away with a genuine respect for the people who built these things, even if you still don’t particularly want to own one.

🏡 The Wooden Boat Inn — Compact Living

The Wooden Boat Inn is tucked into the historic district of Clayton, which means it’s within easy walking distance of everything worth seeing, which is handy because after a long day of enthusiastic tourism your feet will be making their feelings very clear. It’s a small place — a handful of guest rooms and a cottage available for rental — which gives it a pleasantly unassuming character. The rooms are, let’s say, snug and cosy — which is the polite English way of saying they are compact. Actually quite compact. Perfectly manageable for a few nights, but you won’t be doing star jumps in there.

The rooms are en suite, which is good. The bathroom is, however, very much a one-person operation. We had what I can only describe as a bathroom built with confidence rather than space, and you do develop a rather intimate relationship with the fixtures. It all works perfectly well; you just won’t be conducting meetings in there.

☕ Breakfast, Porches, and the Firepit

There’s no breakfast laid on, which sounds like a complaint but actually isn’t. Instead there’s a well-equipped shared kitchen, and attached to it a rather homely porch area with a microwave, a couple of bistro tables, and some comfortable chairs to settle into with your coffee and whatever you’ve managed to cobble together from the local shops. It gives the whole place a pleasantly hostel-like atmosphere — the good kind, where adults who are past the age of sleeping in bunk beds with strangers can still enjoy a bit of communal conviviality.

Outside, there’s a proper outdoor seating area with a picnic bench and a few of those classic Adirondack chairs that seem to be legally required in upstate New York. And then there’s the firepit. The firepit is the social heart of the whole operation — the place where you end up chatting with fellow travellers, sharing travel stories of varying degrees of exaggeration, and staying up considerably later than you’d planned. We liked it enormously.