Escape to Vermont

Recently we took a little trip to Vermont. Our good friend Sharon, a New Englander through and through, somehow got displaced to Oregon a few years ago and every now and again she has to take a soul-filling trip "back home." 

This time, Joe and I went up to spend a few days with her. Because it was supposed to be peak leaf viewing season, hotels in the Burlington area were too expensive for any of our budgets. Our kids have long been fans of AirBnB when they travel, so I called Andrew for a crash course and found us a terrific place to stay in Shelburne. We had two bedrooms, two baths, and a lovely great room/common area. We ate all of our breakfasts and some of our lunches there. It was clean and quiet. And the views outside were beautiful.

This is a photo of Lake Champlain. We took the ferry from NY to VT.

This was the rest room on the NY side of the ferry. I thought it was hilarious that the implication was that the ATM was inside the  rest room (it wasn't).

The First Annual Burlington Baroque Festival was going on while we were in town. We attended two concerts, which were held in the Episcopal Cathedral. One concert was all Bach and was lovely. The other concert was an all Beatles music program, with the Baroque instruments, and excellent singers. I liked it that the audience for this concert was almost entirely white-gray-or-no haired people. The next four photos are from inside the Cathedral. I especially liked the wall behind the altar.

I had heard about a quilt exhibit in the Woodstock, VT, area, and one day Sharon and I left Joe to his own devices (he likes to paint and hike and was deep into his current book) and went off to see what this was all about. It turned out that the local middle school annually has a program where students design a quilt block or use a traditional block, enlarge it, choose colors, and transform the block into a large wooden block that usually goes on the side of a barn. We liked it.

After seeing the quilt exhibit, we wandered into Woodstock, which is a beautiful, very upscale town. We considered exploring the shops and then decided we'd be too tempted to spend money we didn't have on things we didn't need but couldn't resist. So we went down to the park where a food truck was conveniently located, bought our lunch and enjoyed it in the park. We found "upscale food truck" to be a splendid oxymoron.

When our time together had come to an end, Joe and I decided to take two days to go home (we'd split the trip up into two parts, too) and that was a good choice. The trees near Burlington and Shelburne were not yet into their peak of colors, but the over-the-mountain route that we took starting home provided many beautiful views.

We stopped to visit the Vermont Country Store and found it to be just a splendid place. We limited purchases to some thank-you gifts for our daughter who had kept Lizzy for us and some small jars of maple butter (trust me, it's fantastic) for ourselves and for our good neighbors.

We also stopped at Waterwheel House Quilt Shop where I bought a pattern, a bit of yardage, and a beautiful stack of fat quarters.