A Detour to Vermont

We left the Adirondacks and Lake Placid area this morning. Our next stop in New York is “the city”. However, one of the main reasons we want to go there is to visit with Gene’s nephews. Their schedules are pretty hectic so the best we could do was a couple weeks from now. When we started looking around for a campground within commuter train range of Manhattan, they were all full for the Labor Day weekend. So we find ourselves this evening on the far eastern side of Vermont in the town of Brattleboro.

We spent a month in Vermont a couple years ago, but we were up north near Montpellier. Since that time we have been wanting to see a little of southern Vermont. This is our chance. We are only a stones throw from Massachusetts and will probably get down there, as well.

I felt like we had a long hard day; Gene felt like we did okay. Now, there is a difference in perspective. You may be thinking I was sitting in the driver’s seat, but not today. We didn’t get a really early start. It was almost midnight by the time we got to bed last night after watching the Lord of the Rings movie. We couldn’t just jump out of bed to a running start. I wanted to sit in the chair and sip my coffee just one more minute. Then there was the drive. We always do a “map quest” for directions. We haven’t graduated yet to a GPS. It wouldn’t have mattered though. You just can’t get here from there. The problem is Lake Champlain. It is 12 miles across in places. There are no bridges. And there are no interstates. To get to Brattleboro from where we were in New York by interstate we would have had to go to Montreal and then taken provincial roads back to Vermont to pick up interstate or gone south somewhere in Massachusetts. Map quest put together a 168 mile route of several state and federal roads out of the Adirondack mountains south to a place we could cross Lake Champlain, over the Green Mountains, to, what I felt like it should be by the time we got here, the shores of Gilead. In reality, the roads were not that bad, certainly not as bad as some interstates we have driven on. However, when it is your house hitting the pot hole you feel every little ripple. Some of those roads were pretty narrow, some were steep in places, and curvy in the mountains. I was on the look out for every tree branch, mailbox, and welcome flag that hung out over the road. Our trip, which Map Quest promised to be a short 3 ½ hours, really lasted almost 6.

Thank you, Lord, that nothing was broken, we didn’t hit any of those cars parked on the side of the road, and we didn’t run into the back of that truck hauling a load of timber going 10 mph downhill. We arrived safely, albeit a little nerve frayed.

Tomorrow we will begin our exploration of southern Vermont.