First things first, the planning. Last week was Spring Break for the kids. So about a month ago, we decided to go up to Portland, Maine for a couple of days, then through New Hampshire and over to Vermont for a couple more days, making a good 5 - 6 day trip out of it. Unfortunately, while in the midst of booking last minute hotels early last week, we had a "critical" meeting come up in New York, and I would have to be in the city for it on Thursday. That meant either leaving for our trip on Wednesday as planned but me flying back in to town for the meeting on Thursday, or just postponing our departure until after my Thursday meeting. Rather than leave the kids and Kristal up in Portland by themselves and missing part of the trip myself, we decided to go to Portland another time, hold off on that leg of the trip, and just do Vermont over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Departure
So Thursday after my meeting, we left town, driving north on 95 through Greenwich / New Haven / Hartford, CT then on through Massachusetts and Vermont on 91, then over to Burlington, VT. Burlington was our first stop for a couple of reasons. One, our Friday and Saturday nights were to be spent at a cabin (we'll get to that later) but we needed a place to crash Thursday night late (we didn't get in until 1am). But we also needed to be close to Winooski, the location of our "new addition." :-)
Introducing Oliver
Our new three-month old puppy Dachshund. He's a little guy, full of puppy energy, but cute as can be. Kristal has been looking for another dachshund for a while, specifically another rescue (like Roxie was back in Portland). But the rescue out here was slow to help us, and didn't deliver any options, so Kristal started looking on Craigslist. She knew we were going to be in Vermont for the weekend so fired up the Craigslist for VT, and right at the top was a Dachshund puppy. So she followed up, and one thing led to another, and here we are.
His ears are HUGE compared to his body. We'll do an "Oliver" blog post tomorrow if the weather is good!
Burlington
Burlington is Vermont's largest city, on Lake Champlain on the western border of Vermont. It's unique in that it's the smallest city that is the largest city within a state. Er...in other words, of all the "largest city in a state" cities, it's the smallest. :-) Anyways, it's only around 38k people, so it's still small. We got in at 1am Thursday night, so basically found our hotel and crashed. The next morning, we had breakfast at the hotel, and hopped in the car to explore.
There was a nice waterfront area, and up the street from that what looked like a nice walking area with shops and stuff, along with a brewpub, so we parked down on the waterfront, figuring we'd hit the lake, then walk the town a bit. It proved to be a wonderful time!
On the waterfront:
Just up from the waterfront was an Aquarium. We hit that, and it was really cool -- they had lots of animals on exhibit, supposedly every species of fish in Lake Champlain, etc.
The boys doing an experiment with peat moss:
Standing in front of a fish tank:
Watch out for giant bugs!!!!
After the aquarium, we walked up into the little "downtown area" of Burlington. It was AWESOME. Why? Because this area had two things I really miss from Portland:
Beer:
and Hippies:
I admit it! I miss the hippies. I get tired of seeing Wall Street types and professionals all the time around Hoboken and the City. Nowhere around here do you find lazy hippies in the park hacky-sacking or lounging around in the sun all day. I love it!
Burlington, specifically, and Vermont, in general, had a vibe VERY similar to the Pacific Northwest -- laid back, friendly, progressive, and scenery every bit as gorgeous as what we have. Seriously -- nobody on the east coast I've encountered so far in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Mass, Rhode Island, or New Hampshire compares to how friendly the people were in Vermont.
So we had lunch at the Vermont Pub and Brewery:
This place is fascinating. Not only did they have good beers as far as east coast goes, but they are really active in the brewing community in Vermont. Apparently they lobbied Vermont legislature for three years starting in 1985 until Vermont finally legalized a business for "brew pub." They've been in business since 1988 when it passed. Their beers don't have the amazing depth that Oregon beer has, but they still had the best that I've had out as far as craft beers go. In fact, when we told our waiter we were from Oregon, he said "Ahhh, microbrew capital of the world?" Which is true -- the Oregon Brewers Guild just released 2007 numbers, and Portland, OR has more breweries within its city limits (32) than any other city in the world.
We spent a couple more hours walking down Church street -- a closed-off street of shops and food:
Oh, and like I said before, hippies:
The Cabin
That afternoon, we left Burlington to go find our cabins. We were staying in a cabin outside of Stowe, a quaint little ski community about 10 miles from some mountain. While remote, we still had easy road access so could get in to town. This is important for city-slickers like us, who made regular use of the free wi-fi at a pizza place in town. :-)
That's our cabin. And me. After we settled in, the boys and I did some exploring:
The rest of Friday went like this:
- Left our cabin, go meet Oliver and their owners
- Kristal makes immediate connection with puppy, transaction complete
- Go back to Stowe, stock up on evening essentials: hot dogs for BBQ, chips, cheese and wine for later, beer, soda
- Return to cabin
- Boys play with dog until they are all exausted
Friday late night, just as Kristal and I were going to bed, we took the dog out, around midnight, and were amazing by the stars we could see -- no moon, pitch black outside, it was truly amazing. Little did we know this would foreshadow some unsettling events to come.....
Vermont Maple Syrup
Kristal has told me for sometime that one of her life goals was to taste Vermont maple syrup straight from the source. We got our chance on Saturday.
Saturday we visited the Bragg Maple Farm. This is a family owned maple farm outside of Stowe about twenty miles. It's actually not too far from Montpelier (which Kristal and I are still debating on pronunciation!).
We showed up, there's a great little gift shop in the front. We talked a little bit with the lady at the counter of the shop, turns out she's married to third generation Bragg and part of the family that lives there and makes maple syrup. She said there was a "tour," which we knew through our research and were terribly excited to see, but that consisted of watching a film, her explaining how maple syrup is made and how they do things on Bragg Farm, then escorting us into their sugarhouse to see how the boiling process is done.
Bragg Farm utilizes over 2200 maple buckets in their harvesting process:
Without going into detail, there are four types of Vermont maple syrup -- "Fancy", the lightest, Grade A Amber, Grade A Medium Amber, and Grade B. They just got darker and darker with a more concentrated maple flavor in each. The samples of the Braggs' maple syrup was enough to have us picking up maple everything, from a pint of syrup to candies, maple fudge, samplers of the four types, even four maple ice-creams!
Yes, they were immensely good!
We were invited to play around the grass they had there and go look at the animals they had. The boys (I mean Miles, Damion, and Oliver!) were really taken with them:
Then Damion and Oliver played around on the grass for a while:
Later that afternoon, we went back to the cabin. The boys and I went down to the creek behind our place, and built a dam and explored. We then brought Mom out to see our handiwork:
We then decided to go out to dinner at the aforementioned pizza joint with free wi-fi, Pie-Casso. We took the long way home afterwards, and saw some amazing things in the backwoods of Vermont.
The grass meadows of Vermont are mindblowing. You'd think they were manicured, mowed, and fertilized. I've seen the most meticulous lawns show worse than natural grass meadows here:
We ran across a home-made maple harvest rigging on a dirt road about 10 miles out of Stowe:
I couldn't guess when this original covered bridge was built, but it typifies Vermont Country:
We found this running watermill out in the country:
And this rusted out Model-T-looking car, who knows how long it's been out there:
The "boys" relaxing in the backseat on the way home:
That night, Saturday night, ended like any normal night. Kristal and I put the boys to bed on the pull out in the living room, we went to our room to watch TV (we got two channels), turned on Law and Order, and relaxed for a while. We then went to sleep.
At around 2am I woke up to pitch black darkness. Now, I'm a city-slicker, and just don't do well in pitch blackness. Besides, we left a light on dimmed in the living room for the boys, and the porch light on, but there was NOTHING on now. I literally couldn't see my hand in front of my face. I kind of freaked out because I couldn't really get oriented -- there was nothing to set my bearings straight!
It didn't help that what woke me wasn't the blackness -- it was a noise. A strange whirring noise that made itself heard every minute or so. I woke Kristal -- she immediately wanted me to "find out what it was." Great. So I grab the trusty Blackberry from the night stand, and using it's screen glow, guide myself into the pitch black night that had enveloped our cabin. The sound stopped altogether, as I explored, and I checked on the boys -- they were fast asleep. I looked out the windows, and sure enough, there were no lights on anywhere, even though I know that a cabin up the way had left its porch light on too. OK, power's out. Fine.
I go back to bed, report to Kristal that the "sound has stopped" and we tried to rest. We were both freaking out though. PITCH BLACK NIGHT. What if the boys woke up? What would they do, how would they find their way? We lay in bed worrying and imaging the worst possible horror flick scenario until we heard an unexpected shuffle in the living room. Crap -- either the slashing killer has finally made it into the cabin, or maybe one of the boys had woken up.
I grab the Blackberry and go in, and thankfully, it was no masked slasher -- Miles had woken up. He asked me "Dad, can we have a nightlight tonight?" LOL. I nearly told him "Miles, I wish I had a nightlight tonight" but having nothing to offer him, told him and a woken Damion to just come in bed with us. Thankfully we had a King bed in our room -- which all five of us crawled into: Oliver, Kristal, Miles, Damion, and me. All night we tossed and turned crammed in that bed, but at least we could keep each other from worrying too much about the uncertainty contained in that black night.
We all woke up Sunday morning tired, but an excited Oliver got us moving pretty quickly. We had business to attend to. After a quick visit to the original location of Ben and Jerry's:
not only did we need to get home, but we needed to visit........
Funspot
If you've never seen the movie King of Kong, go rent it immediately. It's a documentary about the struggle over the world Donkey Kong high score, and if you didn't think there was drama over video game scores, guess again. Anyways, when it comes to the ultra-elite gaming achievements, there are only a few places in the nation you can go that are "sanctioned" as being legitimate, Funspot being the premier site. Funspot is an entertainment place in New Hampshire that has Bingo, mini golf, snacks, etc.. but it's claim to fame is it's retro arcade -- nearly every classic arcade game you can imagine, from Pacman, to Donkey Kong, from Tapper to Timber, it's here. Funspot plays a central role in King of Kong as a place where two players were to duke it out over the world Donkey Kong high score, the reason being that the DK at Funspot was legit -- if you were going to set a world record, hundreds of players do it on Funspot arcade games.
I played a game of Pacman on THE same machine that Billy Mitchell accomplished the first ever "perfect" game of Pacman. What's a perfect Pacman score? According to Wikipedia:
A perfect Pac-Man game occurs when the player completes all 256 levels with a maximum point score and without losing a life...To attain the maximum possible score of 3,333,360 points, it was necessary for [Billy] Mitchell to eat every fruit, every Power Pellet, every blue ghost and every dot for 256 boards without losing a single life...
That is insane. I played Pacman on THAT machine.
We drove through nearly 60 miles of back country New Hampshire to reach Funspot, which really is out in the middle of nowhere. You wouldn't imagine that one of the nations most legimiate classic arcades is located in the middle of backwoods NH, but it is.
A few pics from inside, this is THE Donkey Kong arcade game from the documentary, where near-million point scores of Donkey Kong have been played, and where Steve Weibe accomplished the first kill screen EVER at FunSpot:
Timber was a fun game, where you are a logger and have to go around cutting down trees while a bear throws bee swarms at you. :-)
Our drive through New Hapshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York home was uneventful. We did see this entertaining bumper sticker:
We had an amazing time this weekend, lots of memories made. I hope you felt just a bit of what we experienced through this post.
Take care all!
