It’s official — we are in love with Vermont!!! We love visiting Pam & Stan, our friends with the beautiful home on top of a mountain where the views are serenely spectacular! We love their friends whom we’ve gotten to know through various functions including dinner parties, kayaking afternoons on the town lake, a turkey supper at the Pomfert Town Hall, a pancake breakfast at the Barnard Town Hall, stunning home tours and friendly cocktail parties. We love Vermont’s scenic byways, back roads, barns, bridges, general stores, old churches and town halls. We love the healthy lifestyle the people who live there embrace. We love the liberal politics. We love the locally-sourced, farm-to-table approach to food. We love the ‘buy local’ approach to buying other products. We love maple everything. We simply love it all…!
This was our first wintertime visit to Butler Mountain and while we were disappointed we didn’t get dumped on like most of the east coast did with Winter Storm Jonas, there was enough snow for us to get out and play in this magical white wonderland. And in addition to the we’ve-come-to-expect-it great meals cooked in and eaten out (it must be all that organic food!) and Stan’s famous Stantinis (think: cosmopolitans on steroids), we also enjoyed a spaghetti supper at the Barnard Town Hall to benefit the Barnard Volunteer Fire Department and First Responders, cocktails and conversation at Dana & Linda’s (can’t remember the last time we were at a party until 1 o’clock in the morning!), hikes in the snow, cross-country skiing, snowmobiling, and a fabulous afternoon making and eating pizzas in Doug & Geraldine’s new outdoor pizza kitchen [that Doug made with wood from the trees on their property] followed up with Eric’s fruit tarts also baked in the wood-burning pizza oven. Some of us skied, most of us imbibed on a little something, the dogs ran around, everyone enjoyed themselves… it was a quintessential wonderfully-awesome winter day in the great state of Vermont!
Here are some little photo sets of our adventures in Vermont. If you click on a photo, you can see a larger version of it. You can also use the arrows at the bottom (click on the photo if they disappear on you) to scroll through all the photos in an album. To close the album, click on the ‘X’ in the top right corner.
Barnard General Store
Pam & Laura’s snow hike to a Sugar House on a friend’s property — it is in places like this that maple syrup gets made
Spaghetti Supper at the Barnard Town Hall sponsored by the Barnard Volunteer Fire Department and First Responders with proceeds going towards a new department station
Stan & Fred checking out the snowmobile trails
Doug & Geraldine’s pizza party
Afternoon cross-country skiing
Snow hike to Luce’s Lookout on the Appalachian Trail
If it weren’t for the accidental friendship we developed with two nice strangers along the tow path of the Delaware River a year-and-a-half ago, Vermont would be just another checked-off state on our list. But gratefully it’s so much more than that to us now! Thanks to the loving kindness of Pam and Stan and their oh-so-very generous hospitality, the spirit of Vermont has now permeated our hearts and souls. Their friends have become our friends and we are forever grateful to all of them for making our winter trip to their state such a special, special one! From the bottoms of our hearts, we thank all of you! Until next time….
