Princeton, July 21, 2025
We‘re driving north tomorrow, Tuesday, although our timeshare week doesn‘t start until Sunday. Andrew, Emily, and the boys love it in Stowe, but complicated grandson made it impossible for them to come up during our normal week…so they rented a lovely house on the hill above the Alchemist Brewery. And invited the grandparents! It didn’t take much coaxing. We spent some of the weekend getting the various toys–bikes, kayak, hiking gear, etc.–ready, and now we’re all set.
Princeton and Stowe, Tuesday, July 22, 2025
We were a little conflicted about leaving. Mia, our sweet 15 year old Collie, isn’t doing well. She’s healthy in most ways–she still eats well and is eager for her walks–but has lost a lot of control of her back legs and gets very restless and confused in the evening. But she’s on lots of medication (an anti-inflammatory, doggie prozac, and, when she needs it, a sedative to help her sleep) and our dog sitter, Pamela R., takes very good care of her.
The newish battery in the Tesla works wonders on a warm day. We made it quite a ways north of Albany, NY in light traffic before having to charge, and a mere 15 minutes on the supercharger (just long enough to share a mediocre sandwich at a Stewarts) got us all the way north in Vermont and to the supercharger at Williston, just east of Burlington. Another 20 minutes gave us plenty of leeway once we got to Stowe.
The house that Andrew and Emily had rented was terrific: it had been voted one of the top five ski chalets in North America.
It had five bedrooms and an enormous great room, seen here populated with Emily and two hungry boys.
We had dinner outside at the Trapp Bierhall, one of our favorites. The boys could run around, play in the gravel, explore around the pond, and eventually eat a bite or two of dinner.
Stowe, Wednesday, July 23, 2025
We were up bright and early, trying to give Andrew and Emily a bit of extra rest, since the boys weren’t sleeping well in their “new” beds. Nothing like a few papa pancakes to set up the day for everyone, though! The Trapp maple syrup didn’t hurt, either.
The boys were reluctant to get out of their pj’s…far too many nooks and crannies to explore in a new house. We finally wrestled them into some clothes for a late lunch in the garden at Idletyme, another of our favorites. The parents have obviously been working hard on table manners.
With a lot of fries and very few bites of protein in their stomachs, the boys declared themselves ready for their introduction to the world of miniature golf! Fortified by the Idletyme’s New England IPA’s (menfolks) and wine (womenfolks), the parents declared themselves ready to face the course, come what may.
The boys stayed interested for at least three holes and actually did pretty well, alternately whacking and pushing their balls toward the cup. They soon discovered, however, that the sand traps were more interesting than the greens.
Boy, does walking that goofy golf course work up an appetite! We piled into our twin Teslas and drove south to Waterbury, hoping to squeeze the boys into a tour at the Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream Factory. That was a no go, but we got in line at the “scoop shop” to drown our sorrows; some were more eager than others.
We each got a delicious serving of ice cream; it really does taste different when its mad that very day!
Andrew and Emily were going out for date night, so we stopped at The Butchery and got a nice ribeye to grill for the boys. It was a great steak, perfectly cooked if I do say so myself, and perfectly accompanied by the Kerr’s corn we had brought up. The boys wanted their steak “drier” than I had cooked it, and Daddy accommodated them with a quick trip to the microwave. Their disdain for the pricy meat certainly didn’t dim their enthusiasm for the corn: two big ears apiece!
Andrew and Emily brought back good reports from Plate, where we will eat next week. We stayed up sipping wine and whisky on the deck long after the boys were in dreamland.
Stowe, Thursday, July 24, 2025
After breakfast from the Trapp bakery, we got a reasonably early start on our expedition to the Wiessner Woods, a large undeveloped tract of land off of Edson Hill Road. It is dedicated to the memory of Fritz Wiessner, a German-American climber who made all kinds of first ascents on rock in Europe and North America and participated in several expeditions to the Himalayas. He and his wife spent their last years in Stowe.
Here’s the hardy crew approaching the trailhead.
And here’s the trailhead itself.
The woods are really a lovely spot for a stroll on a summer morning.
After 20 minutes or so, the boys discovered a magical kingdom hidden in the woods!
There were dozens of gnomes in, under, and around the trees here. And they made people happy!
Next stop was the old sugar house–a facility for boiling down maple sap into our favorite syrup–that was now long abandoned. Or rather repurposed: it now serves as a warming hut for skiers on the Catamount Trail, a nordic trail that runs the length of Vermont.
Even the hardiest of long-distance hikers sometimes need a boost!
Just before we finished our loop, the boys discovered the biggest of the streams that flow through these woods.
And with that, our walk was done.
We had lunch at the Edelweiss Deli on the Mountain Road, during which I introduced the boys to a very close facsimile of my mother’s famous trail snack.
We pottered around the village while Emily had a restorative massage; the boys took their time picking their souvenirs at Shaw’s General Store. Alex’s eyes lit on a lovely little bell (the boys are a bit obsessed with The Polar Express, even in July, and bells have a special meaning); he also picked out a motorcycle (!) Christmas Ornament, while Nathaniel grabbed a light-up Sugar House to hang on their tree.
Everybody retired to the house for some play and relaxation. We had an early dinner at Piecasso, where the boys were fascinated by the painted cow on the waitress’s tee-shirt. We showed them the genuine article as we left.
Andrew also had a massage; when I picked him up, we headed for the Alchemist so that he could lay in a winter’s supply of Heady Topper. The pull of the hand-pulled, creamy, luxurious Heady was too much to resist, and we split one on the deck overlooking the brewery meadow.
We spent the late evening on the deck outside again and watched the stars come out over Stowe!
Stowe, Friday, July 25, 2025
The “other” Jennings family headed south first thing. This Jennings family, on the other hand, was “between houses,” since we were moving into a second airbnb for two nights until we could move into our guesthouse.
We decided that we would drive through Smuggler’s Notch and then down to Burlington, where we hadn’t been for a very long time. We love the notch, with its darkness and sense of mountains looming on both sides.
The plan worked well until we were descending from the notch, when the showers that had been forecast turned to torrential rain, which lasted until we were on the other side of Burlington. We drove south to Shelburne in search of antique stores. We found a nice one, but they had no chairs…so Sue’s quest for chairs for our dining table goes on. We also found an odd one: one room, with old stuff displayed as in a gallery, with absurd prices. It turned out it was basically the home base for an antique watch evaluator and repairer.
The rain had let up, and, after a good charge at Williston, we drove up to our “new” home away from home, a small apartment-like condo at a place in the Mountain Resort called The Lodge. The place was nice enough, although the bed resembled nothing so much as a trampoline.
We relaxed and read and decided to eat in, with a nicely improvised cacio e pepe!
Stowe, Saturday, July 26, 2025
We started the day with a ride on the recreation path, starting at the top, near Topnotch, riding down to the village, and back again. A cool ten miles.
The path was very busy, with tons of cyclists, runners, and walkers, which meant dismounting for all the bridges over the West Branch of the Little River, whose course the path follows.Although the top half is more w00ded, with lots of swimming holes, the bottom half, which starts once you cross to the eastern side of Mountain Road, is just as lovely as it passes through huge meadows as you approach the village.
We followed our ride with lunch at the Alchemist. In the summer months, you can accompany your Heady Topper with chow from the Warren Kitchen food truck = that specializes in Jamaican fare. My burger on a fried plantain “bun” was tasty!
Sue took advantage of the very nice pool at our condo, swimming further than I cared to think about…it was a ridiculously hot day for northern Vermont. The pool worked great as a plunge pool, though!
We had a great piece of remarkably fresh halibut for dinner, and topped it off with some soft serve from the Red Barn Ice Cream shop, continuing our Jamaican theme, since it is run by a Jamaican family.
Stowe and East Hardwick, Sunday, July 27, 2025
It was another transition day for us, so we loaded up the chariot and struck out east, into Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Our goal was East Hardwick and a garden known all over the state, Summersweet Garden Nursery. The forecast called again for showers, which of course turned into a deluge; we hoped for clearing before we reached the garden, but that was not our fate.
The owner, Rachel Kane, started the garden in 1980 while still a student at the University of Vermont. Her parents–both Brits–had purchased a nineteenth century brick house at the edge of the village in 1971 and her father, a landscape architect, had planted trees to give the property some bones and started a herb garden. Rachel focused from the start on rare heirloom varieties; the garden was originally called Perennial Pleasures. In the mid-1980s, Rachel’s mother, Judith Kane, started serving English cream teas to visitors in the gardens, a tradition that still goes on. The garden, originallEast Hardwick’s Summersweet Garden Nursery used to be called Perennial Pleasures Nursery. In 2021, Rachel renamed the business Summersweet Gardens and refocused on native plants, such as the summersweet shrub, which attracts many pollinators. She has about 800 varieties of plants, including more than 100 kinds of phlox,
We weren’t about to let some heavy rain stop us, so we toured the garden in our rain shells. Here are a few rather sodden pics.
As you can see, this is a gardener’s garden, with an emphasis on the plants in all their variety, and not on their display.
This is one of the very few “vignettes” at Summersweet.
The cream tea looked great, but it was too early to indulge. We had a nice drive along the Lamoille River and then south to Montpelier so that we could charge up the car before returning to Stowe.
On the way into town, we returned to our discovery from the winter, Arandas Mexican Cuisine, housed in the elegant surroundings of a Citgo gas station. Although the staff seemed a bit odd this time, the chimichanga was as delicious as we’d remembered.
Our guesthouse was ready when we arrived…two hours early! It was a real pleasure moving in and getting settled; we spent the afternoon enjoying the house.
Dinner was burgers and salad.
Stowe, Monday, July 28, 2025
We had long talked about walking up to Slayton Pasture Cabin, a place that holds a lot of memories for us. We had been skiing up to the top of Round Top, where the cabin sits, for more than thirty years. And it was where we met the couple who convinced us to buy a guesthouse week!
It was the hottest day we’ve ever experienced in Vermont, with temperatures over 90 and the “real feel” much higher than that. It was just too hot for me to enjoy the walk. So we made it all the way out Sugar Road and up the Lower Paris Trail, but turned back at Old Country Road. The woods were lovely in any case, and we walked back along the Russell Knoll Track, another trail we know well from when we have skinny boards strapped to our feet.
We really hadn’t been to town yet, so we walked around a bit and treated ourselves to a soft serve to stave off heat stroke. By late afternoon it had cooled off enough to allow for drinks on our terrace: we can never get enough of the view across Stowe Valley and onto the Worcester Range. Do note the new fence!
Stowe and Morristown, Tuesday, July 29, 2025
We got up fairly early and went for a swim before the pool got too crowded. I swam fewer laps than I wanted: my allergies are the worst in years and I was simply too congested to enjoy the water.
We spent the morning reading and then, after lunch, struck out for another garden. Not too much information was available regarding Cady’s Falls Nursery in Morristown, so we didn’t know what to expect. Don and Lela Avery opened the property as a nursery, again focusing on rare plants. The nursery was run out of the enormous barn on their property. At some point in the recent past they closed the nursery and now maintain their magnificent garden on a donation basis. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves; suffice it to say that this is, acre for acre, one of the most remarkable gardens we’ve ever visited.
The garden is remarkable for a number of reasons, not least because it is maintained by just the two owners. But a tall post at the entrance points to another factor: in the horrible floods that swept through northern Vermont in 2023, the Lamoille River flooded, immersing the garden in almost four feet of water, and leaving a thick layer of silt, rock, and debris behind. None of that is evident today.
Back at the ranch, we beat the heat with a quick dip in the pool, joining the hordes of young folks with the same thing in mind!
Our guesthouse is, for some reason, enormously conducive to reading; it isn’t like we don’t have time to read at home, but we simply devour books up here. I’ve read a biography of Ed Abbey, reread his masterpiece, Desert Solitaire, and am now reading volumes of his essays. Abbey has been a long-time interest, and not just because he lived in Tucson. Although my thoughts on the environment are never as radical as Abbey’s, with his arguments for the preservation of natural areas barred of all human access, those thoughts serve as a kind of measuring point for me. And it has been wonderful to be reacquainted with his non-fiction. I’ve tried, too, to reread The Monkey Wrench Gang, his most popular work, but, even on repeated attempts, I find that and his other novels unreadable.
It’s perhaps worth noting the instigation for this return to an earlier reading self: it was a conversation with our brilliant plumber Kyle. A couple of years ago we had a long talk about Schopenhauer; earlier this year it was Rudyard Kipling and Virginia Woolf; and, with our air conditioning on the fritz just before we left for Vermont, Kyle mentioned casually that his favorite author was Ed Abbey!
We had a really nice meal on the Patio at The Whip, the restaurant of the Green Mountain Inn. Simple but perfect: mussels followed by lobster rolls with slaw and fries!
Our table had been early. We parked the car to charge outside the Trapp Outdoor Center in the twilight and were treated to this view of Round Top.
Stowe, Morrisville, and Johnson, Wednesday, July 30, 2025
Sue started the day with, what else, a long swim. I stayed home and worked on, what else, the blog. It had been sadly neglected!
After a light lunch, we packed the bikes on the car and headed for Morrisville, the nearest jumping off spot for the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail. This is a remarkable cooperative endeavor between a series of towns in northern Vermont.
The initial development of the Lamoille Valley railroad itself was championed by Horace Fairbanks, one of Vermont’s wealthiest residents, who developed an interest in railroads and proposed the line as an attempt to capitalize on commercial development that neighboring railways were bringing into the area. Contracts were secured by December of 1869 and construction was completed by June 1877. The line was originally known as the Vermont Division of the Portland & Ogdensburg Railroad that connected Portland, Maine, with Ogdensburg, New York, and points west.
The conversion work from railroad line to rail trail began in 2013; the trail was completed in 2022. It runs 93 miles across the whole of Northern Vermont from St. Johnsbury in the east to Swanton, near the shores of Lake Champlain.
We parked at Oxbow Park in Morrisville, just off the rail trail, and rode west toward Hyde Park and Johnson. There are a couple of street crossings in Morrisville itself that necessitate a dismount, but after that we rode 7 1/2 miles through forests and fields. The rail trail includes a number of substantial bridges across highways, rivers, and streams.
As we rode, views opened to the west of the big mountains of the Sterling Range.
It was a warm day, but there was a gentle breeze that was particularly evident as we rode through the forests. Much of the way west was a very gentle grade downward, with lots of coasting. The way back was, for the most part, a gentle grade upward, with a couple of steep climbs to road crossings; except for these spots, the trail never exceeds a 3% grade, the most a train can climb (compare this to the mountain stages of the Tour de France, where the riders climb 7-9% grades for miles at a time).
About three miles from Morrisville the grade rose enough to make us work harder…just as it got hotter! At the end of this stretch, though, a sun shower cooled us off and we were soon loading the bikes back onto the car.
Our fifteen mile workout called for a reward, in which we indulged at the Alchemist. A drink on their deck, with a view onto the meadow where young and old cavort has become one of our favorite pastimes in Stowe. The Alchemist has become a genuine community institution, providing a social and recreational center for the whole town.
Back home, a bit of relaxation preceded our dinner at Plate, a small farm to table joint in town. We had an excellent meal: we shared a suberb salad with sushi grade tuna, while Sue had a pork tenderloin and I had pork belly ramen. Both were delicious. And we topped it off with their famous banana pudding. Wines were very good, too: we shared a really nice Pouilly-Fumé with the tuna; Sue had a really good 2019 Elk Cove pinot while I had a 2021 Ridge Three Valleys Zin. I wouldn’t want to drink this Zin too often: it is rich, liqueroux, port-like, but it was a delicious departure from our usual quaffs.
