St Albans

You could reasonably argue that Vermont could have done better for us on this our third visit to the state. 

I am reminded of the comment I heard earlier in our cross country trip reminding me that snow is cold but you can enjoy it. Rain is warmer but it just gums things up. And so it is. We got gummed up with rain even on the New York side but a five dollar truck stop shower helped. 

We were very busy on the New York side of Lake Champlain. After the  showers at the Route 11 truck stop, we did laundry at a laundromat in Plattsburgh where Layne managed the machines while I cleaned GANNET2 to erase any trace of our extended off grid camping since way back in Michigan…and then thanks to Layne’s mastery of the internet she found us ‘flu and Covid  booster shots at Walgreens in Champlain. All free and over very quickly, though I couldn’t help but note one irony. The assistant told me the pharmacy was closing soon for the day as the pharmacist had called out sick and they couldn’t find a replacement. She’s at home with Covid.

Anyway with all that under our belts we took the ferry to Vermont, more precisely a 15 minute ride for $22 from Plattsburgh, New York to South Hero Island, Vermont. 

The ferry ride was easy, just drive up buy a ticket and get in line. There was quite a lot of traffic but the ferries run continuously and each boat can carry dozens of cars. A flat uneventful ride but for one lone sailboat motoring south on the lake who chose to cut under our bows. The ferry captain must be used to it as there was no honking of horns or anything. 

There are ferries all over the place on the lake, even though the direct ferry to Burlington from Port Kent,  our favorite hour long ride, was discontinued by Covid and is apparently not coming back. 

When we arrived it was early evening, dark and gray and wet and the rain started down again so we found a rest area on the freeway and stopped for the night. Layne was starting to feel terrible but I was just rather tired thanks to the shots. 

When we first got Rusty in February 2016 he hated the rain and refused to walk in it, cowering piteously. But gradually he realized that no longer living in the discomforts of the Everglades as a stray, if he gets wet a butler appears as if by magic and briskly rubs him down with a dry towel, which he enjoys very much. Then he gets a treat for his trouble and a dry bed out of the rain. Unaccountably he has lost his dread of the rain and will happily drag me out into it on the least excuse. So it has been in Vermont.  

St Albans exudes wealth and middle class serenity and no amount of rain was going to prevent Rusty from enjoying a tour of the town in all its pristine glory. 

I did manage to find four pieces of trash, one dog turd decomposing in the rain (not Rusty’s - the butler had his bags) and a very small piece of graffiti so I can report social subversion is not entirely dead in St Albans.  A multi screen movie theater in a lovely old building:

It is a pretty town, far from neon signage and chain stores, here they sell coffee by the gallon in coffee bars and advertise themselves as the Maple Syrup Capital of Vermont.  And like New York on the other side of the lake make a half hearted attempt on their signage to accommodate Francophone visitors from Quebec.  Not that Wuebec makes any attempt to accommodate Anglophone visitors! 

The city of St Albans is named for the place in Hertfordshire, a cathedral city north of London. So if you do an internet search  to find out more you may get a return on that place or even, I discovered a St Albans in Maine.  

But wait! Not content with that confusion Vermont has two places called St Albans in the same geographic location! There is the city with the pretty old town photographed here and a donut surrounding the city called the town of St Albans. How ludicrous is that? Let’s have Wikipedia explain because I can’t. 

St. Albans^[5] is the county seat^[6] of Franklin County, Vermont, United States. At the 2020 census, the city population was 6,877. St. Albans City is surrounded by the town of Saint Albans which is incorporated separately from the city of St. Albans. The city is located in Northwestern Vermont in Franklin County. It lies 29 miles north of Burlington, the state's most populous city which is located in Chittenden County.

St Albans was created in 1763 by a colonial land charter and actually got some residents a decade later just in time for the revolution so this place has been around and you can see that in the architecture. It really is lovely and evocative, a place of wealth thanks to rich soil and the railroad industry. 

The city was carved out of the town in 1902 when business leaders  snatched two square miles (a quarter of the size of Key West) and made their own city of the same name. I can hardly imagine the hulaballoo that must have caused at the time. 

St Albans is about 15 miles from Canada and used to be a major railroad hub for products crossing the border as well as European immigrants coming through Canada to the US. Weirdly enough Layne’s phone lost its mind and welcomed her to Canada this morning. 

However we’ve decided we have no particular reason to cross on this journey as we are heading east not north. 

I’ve seen stones shaped to protect the corners of buildings from carriage wheels, but only in Europe.  They look just like these below, which I saw in St Albans. The idea is an errant iron shod wheel will ride up on the curved stone and slide back to earth without damaging wheel or building. Clever. 

I liked walking around with young Rusty even having to raise and lower my umbrella as conditions required. 

We spent an hour wandering the city streets while Layne struggled to get over her symptoms of ‘flu and fever, sweating it out in bed.  

Even from here on the road I have noticed the belligerence in Central Europe as Ukraine whips the Russians, that Soviet army we feared do much and for so long,  who are responding to the embarrassment by upping the warlike rhetoric. For a while there I thought how pleasant it was to be in unwarlike Vermont. And then I read about the St Albans Raid. War gets everywhere. 

Who knew the Civil War came to Vermont? Not me. On October 19th 1864 a group of 21 Confederate soldiers entered the US from Canada, robbed some banks in St Albans killing one resident and then they legged it back across the border with their loot concluding the Northernmost “Engagement” of the Civil War. How about that? 

It seems they had escaped pursuit by fleeing to Canada and wanted to justify their existence by “raising money” for their cause and they hoped distracting Union troops to protect the country from Canada! 

This is still its own world is Vermont l, where the car dealer prides itself on burning alternative energy even as they post vast gas guzzling trucks for sale. The customer is always right. I suspect the feeble internet access we suffer from around here is due to a scarcity of towers. Everyone loves their phones but the towers that provide them are not always  loved. 

Solid and serene St Albans. Quite an interesting town. And we never did get to try the Nepalese food at the Kathmandu restaurant which was closed on Tuesdays. Bummer.