resident snake

must be snake season.  

i guess i'd rather have him on the top of the compost pile than underneath the lawn mower.

still, it gives me the eebyjeebies.

burly

So, yeah.  Yesterday was a trip to Burlington, to look around vermont's big city.  It definitely felt more developed than lots of other places I've been--in both good and bad ways.  The Church Street area was beautiful, but also annoyingly full of the types of stores that can be found in any other shopping area: macy's, eddie bauer, patagonia, banana republic, borders, etc.. The place feels less unique, more commercialized, for sure.

To be fair, the Church Street market also had a good share of cool local businesses, too: I wrote postcards I'd picked up at Apple Mountain gifts while sitting in Uncommon Grounds. I met up with my UW colleague Courtney at Sweetwaters, where I had a pretty fine eggplant sandwich.  Crow Books appeared to be a nice, mostly-used bookstore, and there were various boutiques and jewelry stores too, if you're into that kind of thing.

But the real fun, for me, was off the strip.  I stopped into the marriot to ask for directions to the Switchback Brewery, then enjoyed a nice (rainy) walk down Pine Street to find it.  Turns out, the brewery tours are only on Saturday, but I was able to pick up a couple pint glasses and some free stickers.  The brewery is relatively small, mainly because there is no bottling operation: it only comes in kegs, so ends up mostly on tap in the bars.  Their main beer is a tasty, smooth ale.

The brewery people gave me a great recommendation for lunch: Four Corners of the Earth.  Though I'd walked by the deli on the way to the brewery, I woulda totally missed it with out the recommendation--it's tucked away towards the back of a big building, and it sorta feels like you're wandering around a USPS warehouse parking lot to find it.  In any case, the owner there suggested the special, a pork-loin sammie with fresh coleslaw toasted with some really fine bread.  It was the simplest kind of delicious: good ingredients, well balanced.  I may stop back in next time I head to Burlington.

Which I'll do soon, since I stopped in at the local non-profit bike store, Local Motion, and they hooked me up with some really great trail info.  I'm excited about the Island Line trail, and look forward to getting back in July on a sunny day.  Here's a view of Lake Champlain from the waterfront:

And here's a view down Church Street, from the foot of the Unitarian Church at the north end of the street: 

self portrait

here's a picture from my day in burlington.  more about the trip tomorrow, but wanted to get at least this pic up.  i like it a lot.

heroism / words to chew on

"The source of all existence ... yields the world's plenitude of both good and evil.  Ugliness and beauty, sin and virtue, please and pain, are equally its production. ... Hence the figures worshiped in the temples of the world always beautiful, always benign, or even necessarily virtuous. ... Likewise, mythology does not hold as its greatest here the merely virtuous man.  Virtue is but the pedagogical prelude to the culminating insight, which goes beyond all pairs of opposites."  -- Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces

breaking news

here's what the montpelier/barre paper has to report today.  results make me feel like i'm not so far from home.

stowe/waterbury

Yesterday I hiked the Stowe Pinnacle/Hogback Mtn trail.  Somehow I messed up my foot somewhere in the past few days, but the hike was spectacular.  It was also kinda brutal; I feel ridiculously out of shape.  I feel like the humidity takes it outta me.  Anyway, here's a pic of the trail, before it gets steep and rocky:

After the hike, I stopped in Waterbury to look around a bit.  A thunderstorm warning came over the radio on my way into town, and they weren't kidding.  I bounced the car off the curb trying to leave town, since it was raining so hard I couldn't see out the window.  Somehow the picture I took of town had a sorta "1983" look to it, which I tried to enhance with editing software.  Suhweet.

60 up, 30 down

Gmaps says my ride this afternoon was about 12 miles (if I calculated my turnaround point, anyway), up Cox Brook Road.  The road is mostly straight, but still really pretty, and the closest non-highway ride.  The first two miles or so were paved, then good unpaved roads beyond that, along the brook.  Initially it looked like I might get rained on pretty good, but then the sun came out and I had really great temperatures.

I didn't have my camera with me, but here's a picture I could find of the lower bridge:

another good day

the line-up for today:

• tour of north america's largest granite quarry
• hike to paine mtn.
• dinner with will and tawnya in randolph

the tour at the Rock of Ages quarry was pretty awesome.  the scale is impressive; they're the quarry who created a 12-foot tall statue of Pope JPII.  They slab it off in 200-ton blocks.  80% of their granite is for gravesite memorials/masoleums, but they also make surface plates for industry.  we got to hear (but not see because it was too far below us) a blast during the tour.

after eating lunch at a diner/movie-rental store (vermont cheddar burger with handcut fries), i decided out check out a nearby hike in the hiking guidebook i picked up in montpelier earlier this week.  i got lost.  or, more accurately, i lost the trail, and i'm still not sure exactly where.  but i think there is another road i'd like to explore there, so i might take the bike back with me another day.  i'll just have to be careful not to run over any frogs:

while i was out wandering, i heard back from tawnya, who is out in vermont for will's dad's wedding.  twenty miles from northfield.  so, they invited me for dinner and strawberry-rhubarb crisp and really, how could i say no?

the view from here

today i stomped around the ski hill east of northfield.  vermont has some steep country, but i found my way to the top (ish) of the hill and also wandered around the old slate quarry.  (tomorrow i'm thinking i'll head to world's largest granite quarry, just over the hill from here.)  anyway, here are some pics of my hike; the wild turkey i scared up flew away too fast for me to get a good picture.

here's a flower shaped moth hanging out on some dead leaves.

here's a picture of the old highway.  (actually, i don't know what it is, but it's a neat old cut through the rock near the slate quarry.)

somehow my camera ate several pictures i took of a fallen tree with little communities of fungii growing on it.  maybe i'll be back before too long and can try again.

mont - peel - yer

Today I spent some more time wandering around the capital.  The search for cheesecake was unsuccessful, but I'll continue the valiant effort.  I predict success, eventually.  In the meantime I found a bar of ginger chocolate to keep my taste buds entertained.  (And brussel sprouts, too!)

Anyway, here is a photo of the Hubbard Park observation tower, on the hill behind the capital, a view from the trail, and a photo of town.  I can think of worse ways to spend a day, and worse places to spend it in, too.

rainy days

If I was disappointed that summer was slow in coming to Laramie, relocating 2000 miles away hasn't really solved the problem: Vermont has been mostly rainy for the last three days, and coldish too (high in the low 60s today).  On the bright side, I really, really needed to get my online course put together before class starts tomorrow, so the weather has been a good thing.  Happily, the course is now about 95% ready for lift-off.  Sunny, near-eighty-degree weather isn't forecasted until Wednesday, but I'm planning to get out tomorrow to do some more exploring.

Also, I want some cheesecake.  Perhaps that will be the guiding force for tomorrow's exploration....

trip east

Here's a slideshow I made of my trip.  I may play with it some more, so that it plays in order, which I can't figure out.  Essentially, it shows a driver view of the trip at every 100 miles (very roughly--sometimes I looked down at the Trip A odometer and realized I'd driven 12 miles past the hundred mark, so I'd take a shot then instead of turning around and driving back...).  So, essentially, the 23 pictures are Mile 0 to Mile 20 plus the bridges into and out of Canada (at Detroit and Cornwall).

What's interesting about the slideshow is not the variety but the relative conformity of the images.  More than 85% of the trip was completed on interstate roads, and the impact of that mode of travel is obvious: the whole continent looks pretty much the same, zinging by at 75 mph on controlled-access roads.  Or, at least, the windshield view is pretty much the same.  It's a bad way to get any sense for the uniqueness of geography, I think.

a brief list of highlights

I'd hoped to get a slideshow of my trip assembled by today, but it's not quite there yet.  But, in the meantime, some brief notes to get this blog started; I'll fill in backstory in the next few days, too.

So:

• A taxi halfway between Rapid City and Wall, SD.  I'm going to imagine that this was a "bucket list" trip, someone who had a random free day, decided they'd fly into Rapid, take a cab to Wall Drug, eat a 25-cent cone, and cross that one off the list.
• An elephant in Sherburn, MN.  Actually, a slide, at the park where I stopped to eat lunch on Day 1, part 2:

• Sushi in Cedar Rapids.  Really, a great visit all-around to my friend Ross and his wife Jessica.
• Highway 30 around the south end of Chicago.  Not a "highlight," really, except that the traffic was moving.  Unlike I-80, where things were a standstill for 40 minutes before I decided to dodge off.
• Zingermann's and Angelo's in Ann Arbor.  Mmmm, food.

That'll have to be enough for now; it's bedtime.