New England Trip Day 2: Vermont
Recovered from our earlier adventures, Wednesday morning, Meagan, Jayne, and I stopped downstairs at the café for a light breakfast before packing up the car to Burlington, Vermont. It was a fun ride northwest. Halfway along the way, we stopped at Dartmouth for some more coffee and pastries at the Dirt Cowboy Café (informally known as the Dirty Cowboy back in my day, and hopefully still). We then returned to the car and finished the drive to Burlington.
Although I had driven through Burlington in route to Montreal before, I had never visited the town itself. Burlington is a cool small city, and has a nice pedestrians only area on Church St. There was a two-week jazz festival going on, so there was a lot of activity for a Wednesday afternoon. There were lots of “Vermont cool” people milling about. I told Meagan that we could add Burlington to the acceptable places to live list, given the vibe of the city and its proximity to mountains and water. Not the same as Seattle or the west coast, but maybe one day…
After strolling through town, we stopped at the Sweetwater Café for a nice lunch. After lunch, Jayne took us to the airport so we could pick up our rental car. Meagan and I said our goodbyes, Jayne headed back to Boston, and we proceeded to the Budget counter to pick up the car. Actually, we were upgraded to an enormous Ford Explorer SUV. Fortunately we didn’t have any tight parallel parking situations over the next few days or we would have been doomed.
We then headed south to Waterbury, VT, home of Ben & Jerry’s and the place where we were meeting our photographer, Daria Bishop, for our “engagement photo session”. We knew we’d like Daria based on reading her blog, and our suspicions were affirmed many times over the next two hours. She treated us to some ice cream (me: Vanilla Heath Bar, Meagan: Raspberry), and then followed us around the colorful Ben & Jerry’s grounds while Meagan and I had fun and played like childish adults. The weather was forecasted to be iffy, but fortunately the showers held off and we had some great cloudy afternoon light for the pictures.
Once we finished shooting at the ice cream mecca, we drove a few miles north to Stowe, VT, a quintessential Vermont ski town. This too could be a future east coast hometown. We continued our frivolity, with Daria in tow to capture the fun and egg us on. We haven’t seen the pictures yet, but based on what we’ve seen of her work and how much fun we had talking with Daria and doing our engagement session, I can’t imagine a better photographer for our wedding - that’s definitely one thing I am not worried about for the July event. I’m looking forward to seeing the photographic evidence of our fun afternoon.
After we parted ways with Daria (her lighthearted farewell was to advise us not to destroy too much of the environment with the SUV…nice!), we stopped by The Shed in Stowe for dinner. With the timber construction, plenty of ski and action sports bumper stickers, and the acoustic band, it definitely felt more like a winter ski apres-ski session than a summer dinner. We had a nice meal and a local beer before packing in the Ford Monstrosity and speeding across Vermont towards East Burke.
I got a glimpse of the nearby towns of Lyndonville and East Burke before we drove up the hill to the Inn at Mountain View Farm. Although it was dark, the place looked really cool, and I was excited to finally see the wedding site. Fred, the chef and one of the innkeepers, graciously stayed late for our arrival, and showed us to our room. We were the only ones staying that night, so we were allowed to roam and check the place out. All of the rooms in the main lodge were fantastically maintained, and there were some nice common spaces on the first floor for informal entertaining for our weekend in July.
We were quite tired though, and it was dark, so the rest of the exploring would have to wait until the next day.