The third stop on our New England road trip was in Burlington, Vermont. Vermont is a place that had never been on my radar before, so I was shocked as we left Maine and New Hampshire behind and suddenly found ourselves in the beautiful Green Mountain range. I really can’t even describe the beauty around me, and unfortunately I didn’t really get any photos either since photos through a car window while driving just really don’t do a place the justice it deserves. You’ll just have to believe me when I say it was gorgeous. It’s what I thought that Maine would be, but wasn’t.
A lot of this trip was rather spontaneous since I never researched what there really is to do in New England. We had some slam dunks and some total misses, but all in all it was a great couple of days.
We started off by checking into a great Airbnb in Burlington that provided a cool view of Lake Champlain. It was the first Airbnb that our dog was truly comfortable in, so she was finally able to relax and get an appropriate amount of sleep. It was also the cleanest place we’d stayed of any Airbnb ever. We ordered a pizza that evening and just stayed in to relax and play card games.
In the morning we made our way to the infamous Church Street Marketplace where we had breakfast and coffee, shopped, and did a tasting at a distillery—bourbon, rye, and whiskey for the husband, and all things maple liqueur for me! Breakfast was at the Friendly Toast, coffee was from The Cosmic Grind, and the distillery was Smuggler’s Notch. I highly recommend all of these places. The Cosmic Grind has about a 15 page menu of all of their specialty coffee drinks, along with some fun artwork inside. Right up my alley for sure!
We took our coffees down to the lake and sipped them while walking along the boardwalk and then stopped in for a few beers at Foam Brewing. This brewery had a great patio for sitting outside (the first warm weather day we really experienced in a week of traveling). It provided great views of the lake, great people and dog watching, and great beer.
Dinnertime was when we hit our first snafu. We attempted to eat dinner at Burlington Beer Company, but when we got there they were closed for a staff party with no mention of it on their website or their socials. We ended up eating at a dive bar called The Old Post, which was fine, but not worth writing about. We stopped at a couple of other breweries on our way back to the airbnb. Queen City and Zero Gravity both had good beers, but both felt more like restaurants than breweries to me. I may be alone in this thought, but I like my breweries to be focused on the beer rather than the food.
The next day we ventured out of Burlington to visit Hill Farmstead Brewery in Greensboro Bend, The Alchemist in Waterbury, and vonTrapp brewery in Stowe. I’ve heard of the vonTrapp family before, but I haven’t heard of Hill Farmstead although husband says it is a very well known place. The maple lemonade at vonTrapp was the best thing I drank on the entire trip! We enjoyed a nice day of drinking beer out in the countryside.
The following morning we checked out of our Airbnb and took the ferry across Lake Champlain to New York for a couple of nights in Saratoga Springs.
This portion of our trip was pretty short and sweet. Reviewing it now, it doesn’t really make for a good blog posting, but since this website is really just for me anyway I’m including it. If I could go back to Vermont again, I would definitely spend some time in the mountains and look into some hiking. Also, if it were a bit later in the year I’d look into charter fishing. There’s really so much to do in this area—it would have paid to do more research!
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