The Family Blog: Vacation in Vermont

We went with Aaron, Martha, Liam and Caleb on a vacation in Vermont to celebrate the mens' 40th birthdays. We see them every Christmas but haven't had much time to really bond with them, so this was a great vacation to see random stuff, let the kids play "hide from monsters" and stay up 'til the wee hours drinking beer and talking about parenting, personal finance, high school, you name it. Fortunately, the kids got along swimmingly.

While on the rest of the way to Lake Champlain, we stopped at a bunch of places.

There was a lot of driving - to get to Vermont, to get to places around Vermont, to get to the grocery store etc. The kids were fantastic travelers. They tolerated the driving like absolute champs, and kept themselves - and us - fully entertained.

Aaron's family flew into Boston, so on the first day, both families stopped over at Battleboro to break up the trip. The hotel was pretty run down, but we got breakfast and a chance to hang out in the pool the next day.

Steam room

First, the Brattleboro food co-op

Green Mountain Spinnery, in Putney. The spinnery had some real live Shetland sheep in the back. The Co-op was only manned by about about 20 people, who would shear the sheep, but they also bought wool from neighboring farms. They brought in the raw, unwashed wool with all the vegetable matter, bugs and other stuff, and then washed it in a giant washer. They pressed all the water out of it, until it was dry and clean. Then, they would card the wool with these giant carding machines below. These machines are apparently about 100 years old, and were purchased from some closed spinneries in Maine. Then they would spin the wool into yarn, dye and weave the strands to form lots of different colors.

Stop over at the children's science museum, where they had magnificent bubble wands, bee hives, outdoor streams and rock gardens to play in.

Downtown Burlington. We were able to see the annual Burlington festival, where street performers came from all over the world. They had truly amazing performances, and this was probably one of the first times I've seen almost everyone in the audience actually put their money in.

Rowan is mesmerized by a comedian in suspenders riding a unicycle, but there were also trampoliners, and acrobats.

The "cabin" actually turned out to be a ginormous mansion with a humungous kitchen and ridiculously large bathrooms. Unfortunately, the previous tenants broke a whole bunch of stuff, including walls. More unfortunately, the water was sulfurous, and we actually lost running water mid-way through the stay. Most importantly, they didn't have a functional french press! So poor Dan had to get his morning stimulant through some complicated process with coffee filters.

We had to work around some dietary restrictions, like no carbs for the Wulffs, no meat for Liam, no candy for the Litwillers (yeah, right...), which was a far cry from their early days.

Playing Uno

Lake view

Visit to the Bragg Sugar Farm, where they make maple syrup (67% sugar), maple cream (not pictured, most of it is in Dan's belly already), maple sugar, maple candy and maple ice cream.

Martha wanted to stop by Waterbury Falls. There were plenty of crystal clear, ice cold pools to get fully immersed in, but we generally preferred to get only surface deep.

Visit to Shelburne farms. Shelburne farms is another Vanderbilt mansion, built for their vacations, but now turned into an awesome business. With more animals out back, with a snack shack in the front. Other parts of the building house the bakery, the cheesemakers, and the woodworkers.