Imagine you're Barbara Faure.
You and your husband have owned The Golden Pheasant, a restaurant and inn between the Delaware Canal and the Delaware River in Bucks County, for 10 years.
Nature has not been kind.
First, heavy rains on some October weekends hurt business.
Then, interminable snowfalls - at least 11 really unpleasant ones since November - kept customers away.
Add January flooding from the Delaware River.
But wait, there's more.
On March 18, the state closed a piece of River Road north of New Hope to begin a $2.4 million repair of the Delaware Canal that borders the narrow two-lane thoroughfare.
Just when customers should be coming back, like birds of spring.
Canal repair work will close several pieces of River Road, one after the other, into mid-July.
``It's going to be pretty bad for our business,'' said Faure, whose inn is near Erwinna, about 10 miles north of New Hope. ``It's going to be terrible.''
Along River Road, it is not a happy time. At the Black Bass Inn in Lumberville and at Bucks Bounty and Evermay near Erwinna, the mood fit the stormy afternoon one day last week.
For the man who handles 100,000 canoers and tubers each year, the timing was especially awful.
Thomas McBrien, owner of Bucks County River Country (formerly Point Pleasant Canoe), had returned from a European vacation on Wednesday to discover the road closing.
``It's a shocker to me, that's for sure,'' he said on his first day back.
His nine buses shuttle customers from his Point Pleasant base to drop-off sites north on River Road, from which they float on inner tubes downriver to Point Pleasant.
The buses, he said, will now have to use back roads.
``It'll be very hazardous on our buses,'' McBrien said, because the detour roads are ``steep and winding.''
The road closings, he said, ``could be devastating - I'm talking about the overall businesses along the river valley.''
* Some business owners complain they received little notice of the closings.
``It is an emergency,'' said Lois Morasco, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.
``I really do sympathize with them,'' she said of the owners. ``It is going to be painful. . . . We understand that and wish it weren't so.''
Because winter storms had damaged the canal so badly, PennDot only had time to distribute about 500 announcements of the repair work from Kintnersville to Center Bridge.
Morasco said there was no time to follow the normal PennDot procedure of calling meetings to discuss the repairs.
