Stop! You Won’t Fit!

We were following Vermont Highway 108, a tourist drive through Smuggler’s Notch up Mount Mansfield. The signs were incessant, no tractor trailers! Your GPS is wrong! You won’t fit! $4,000 fine if you try! I was laughing muttering to myself “You won’t fit…” clearly there have been truck drivers ready to give it a go anyway. 

We stopped to get some maple scones and headed for the 2,000 foot pass. I was looking forward to the challenge, whatever it was. We’ve managed seriously winding roads in Mexico and eleven thousand foot passes in the Rockies. Vermont? We won’t fit? Of course we will! However it actually was unique and weird up there: 

The road signed warned one lane ahead and be ready to stop. The center line disappeared and the road wound around massive rocks tossed at random into the woods. Never seen that before. The road yielded to Mother Nature. 

It was almost noon yet it was nighttime dusk up there on a gray day under the canopy. Photos don’t show steep hills very well but 16 degrees is extremely steep and I was glad we were going down hill on this side, as the road twisted and turned such that you couldn’t see any traffic coming. I crawled ready to stop instantly as uphill traffic has right of way. 

The descent went on for a while until we spotted an actual picnic area. Until then we had seen a few pullouts masquerading as parking for trail heads with no toilets or tags cans anywhere. 

There was a Clivus composting pit toilet here similar to the ones I’ve seen at Fort Jefferson National Park. We use no chemicals in our porta potty, just a sprinkle of baking soda for odor control. It’s cheap and available everywhere and won’t screw up bacteria in sewer systems so it’s safe to dump anywhere. So we did and then wandered the woods. 

That was the only facility of any kind we found on our mountain drive which surprised us. Scenic vista points, turn outs, picnic areas are all as rare as hens’ teeth in the north east. Never mind wild camping on public land. 

Rusty enjoyed the woods as he seems to have come to terms with deciduous forests after growing up in south Florida. 

I imagine these tables get a lot of use in the summer months but they did not look inviting to me. 

It was an enchanting spot all to ourselves and the temperature was quite comfortable. I’ve switched to jeans and a long sleeved shirt but temperatures are supposed to be in the mid sixties by day for a few more days.  

We came out of the state forest on our way to Stowe when we saw two hikers thumbing a lift. 

Nate and Tyler are hiking the Long Trail, 300 miles which cuts across New England from the coast to Canada roughly speaking. Survivors of many long hikes including the mighty Appalachian Trail they were hungry and wanted to be dropped off at a deli somewhere in Stowe, a dozen miles down the road. 

I think they were surprised by two old foges wild camping in a van and we reminisced about Lake Roosevelt in Arizona where Nate had friends with a houseboat and we cooked in the spring heat. 

Stowe is pretty and predictably upscale with lots of lovely stores and tons of visitors. There was no obvious parking anywhere, every street was packed but the crowds put me off so we turned around and left. 

The half hour drive to Waterbury was lovely in sunshine with puffy clouds and rolling hills and meadows and forest. 

Waterbury was an entirely different stop. There was parking and just a smattering of people hurrying hither and yon like locals with business to take care of. We parked and walked. 

A pretty town but we’ll lived in. We passed a vehicle indirection station. I thought about how my Florida registration is expiring and I can renew my 2020 van for two years for less than a hundred bucks. No inspections and all done online. 

Solar water heaters might give one hope the sun shines often around here: 

Rusty and took a humped bridge over some railroad tracks. I like railroads and leading lines and I missed them in the Keys. 

A bridge that spawned a bookstore! 

They just can’t stop thinking and being provocative, can they, these Vermonters: 

More solar panels, which are hardly ever seen in Florida, the sunshine state. 

Random artworks fascinated Rusty not one jot as he enjoyed ground level attractions. 

As usual racism finds no place in Waterbury. 

Union made Lee Jeans. Happier times maybe. 

Yes it says moose cross the road around here. I know what a moose looks like I’m pretty sure and I’m equally sure we didn’t see any. 

We did have to stop for a flock of wild turkeys making up their minds to cross the road but in Vermont no one seems to lose their cool if the unexpected gets in your way. 

Burlington On Lake Champlain

The promise of more rain. 

In a letter to a friend I described myself as “becalmed,” as I felt  suspended between a wet earth and a low dark sky reeking of more rain to come. 

Layne’s reaction to the booster reminded me why I don’t want to get Covid. The effectiveness of the shots is always dubious for her as her rheumatologist has never located anywhere antibodies in her system. 

However she always has the fiercest reactions to the vaccines as though she is well on her way to getting the disease. It took her 36 hours to find her feet and shake off her fever. Meanwhile I sat around wondering what to do. 

I had planned some walks with Rusty in some parks familiar to me around Burlington but the incessant rain trapped me aboard with short umbrella breaks in the murk. I was getting cabin fever.  

GANNET2 makes a comfortable home and inside we were quite snug with no humidity or condensation to bother us. Layne slept and I sat up front reading and ready to go. Go where? Anywhere. I like the going part of being a nomad. 

I found a city park and it looked lovely on the shore of the lake. It’s last day of operation in 2022 was Labor Day. I saw no reason to close the park so arbitrarily at the official end of summer but no one was asking for my opinion. Up the road I found another place called Cohen Park. Photos above. 

Thanks to the Cohen family for donating the land and for the town keeping the park open in the Fall, but… the toilets were locked. I wonder why? We carry our own toilet so no problem for us, but still. 

I enjoy the Vermont countryside, it reminds me of England, the neat hedgerows and narrow winding roads of my youth -excellent motorcycle riding - but I’m not sure I could make it in a state where even some  locals shudder in horror at the severity of winter. 

I’m pretty certain I’m not tempered to survive say sitting in a damp duck blind waiting to kill one of a pair of mates flying overhead and enjoy the experience. Certainly not in the cold and damp of a stilt structure over a cold windy lake. Vermonters are a hardy people apparently.

Worrying about stuff like ice falling on me is also outside my comfort zone…

They do like their signage in Vermont. 

I like the signs to Canada: 

And then there’s Burlington the largest city in this state of 650,000 residents. 

So we parked and walked to Church Street, the pedestrian heart of Burlington. 

Church Street Market, designed to imitate a pedestrian zone first seen  in Europe. Bill Truex, an architecture student was in Copenhagen in 1962 and saw a pedestrian zone and nagged people at home to do the same in Burlington. This pedestrian street was opened in 1981 and since I first saw it 6 years ago I’ve figured Duval Street should do the same but Key West is of a different mindset. 

They even have benches to sit on where Key West, so scared of its bums moving in it removes any possibility of people relaxing and enjoying Duval. They even have City Hall right there on Church Street. 

We finally got some sunshine so Layne got to see this street I had told her of so often. She has suffered from Church Street envy for a long time. That’s because last time we were here she was in the hospital getting her gall bladder removed and watching Fourth of July fireworks from her hospital bed overlooking the lake. She has wanted to walk Church Street ever since. This is the oldest building on the street, built in 1846, notable not just for being painted white but also for having a gabled (pointed) roof: 

Rusty was anxious to sniff it all as though he remembered his last visit here…( the photo below I took that summer)…

…in July 2016. Four months after we got him we took him to Canada, no doubt the first time he’d ever left the heat of South Florida and he handled it with his usual poise. He’s an old hand at travel by now. 

Black Lives Matter is an important theme in Burlington and you’ll see the signs everywhere even though barely one and a half percent of Vermont’s population is black and Vermont is not known for its Jim Crow obstructionism. If they really did dismantle white supremacy in the state, as Ben and Jerry’s desires, there would be no one left to run it. But that’s just me being obtusely practical. 

I find it all rather ineffectively charming though it is a good deal less offensive than the armed book burners showing up at the library in Bonner’s Ferry in Idaho demanding censorship in the name of freedom. 

Layne is not impressed.  She says when we tire of being nomads Vermont will not be on the list. It’s too cold ten months of the year and for her, tropical lives matter. I stand corrected counselor.