Friday (October 16th) was a rainy, stay-in-your jammies kind of day. Which is exactly what we did. We did school and work in the morning, ate a yummy "charcuterie plate" lunch while watching a Nat Geo kids show about moose, and then visited with Gma and Gpa Elwood on Facetime for a bit. That afternoon we took a "rainy day road trip" to find the last few covered bridges in Montgomery that we hadn't spotted yet (on all our passes through the town and area). We checked them all off and solved the mystery of why our map had another one listed but google maps didn't show it: it has been put away in storage! Since we were in the area, and it was dinner time, we picked up a couple pizzas from Fire on the Mountain Pizza in town (their Vermonter with carmelized onions, apple slices, Cabot cheddar, sausage, garlic and maple syrup was SO dang good!).
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| The summer sausage and some of the cheese is from here! I've been itching to have a snack lunch like this since we bought it and today was the perfect day! |
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| Fun chat and photo by Cal and Sam, as usual. |
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| A good texting convo with my sister Heather led to her sending me this quote which I really love. Thanks, Heatha! |
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| I spy Hutchins Bridge in the rain! |
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| The view from the other side. |
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| We traversed a narrow and rocky dirt road to find the next one. |
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| West Hill Covered Bridge on Creamery Bridge Road. |
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| In we go. Sam had fallen asleep on the bumpy dirt road so he missed going through this one. |
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| We popped out on the highway right here near Comstock Bridge, which isn't new to us, but holds the record of "most times driven across by the Blanchards" (it's kind of our fave). |
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| As we were exploring more of Montgomery and a potential disc golf course nearby, we got to see Fuller Bridge again, too. :) |
On Friday night we looked at the forecast and decided that this weekend looked most promising for an overnighter getaway down to Southern Vermont. We wanted more than just a couple hours down there to explore since it's about three and a half hours away from here, so we used our last free hotel night stay and booked!
Saturday morning (October 17th) was misty and moisty and as we drove down the highway away from Jay, the clouds lifted just enough that we could spy some snow that had fallen overnight! There was much rejoicing in the car as we made a quick detour up to Stateside to check it out.
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| I love this view of this cute little white church on a hill as we come down into Montgomery Center. It's not the best pic ever, but trust me when I say it is such a pretty sight in real life! |
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| It was a gorgeous drive, yet again. If Vermont has an ugly spot, we haven't seen it yet! |
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| I spy more snow! |
You may know of our quest to eat 100 cider donuts during our stay in Vermont. We added to the tally (up to 32!) by stopping in Manchester at Equinox Valley Nursery's Pumpkin Patch on our way south. Gregg's friend recommended this one, so we made sure to stop. They were fresh and delish and we had fun exploring the displays of pumpkins and gourds and scarecrows. It reminded us a bit of the pumpkin walk, but not nearly as cute or clever. ;) (But talk about tourist town - Manchester was fancy pants!)
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| The mountains in the background were completely stunning! My photo doesn't even come close to showing their beauty! |
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| Who wore it best? |
Our next stop was in Bennington, in the southwest corner of the state. We found a great big park (Willow Park) with a supa fun playground plus disc golf course and hung out there for a while. The day was perfect and the leaves were peaking all around us and it was a glorious afternoon!
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| We parked at the small upper lot (that Google directed us to), but the big play area was way down the hill. No problem! Turns out running down a giant hill is a great way to get some wiggles out! |
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| See that huge monument yonder? That's the Bennington Battle Monument. It's huge and you can see it from all over! |
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| Gah! I walked laps around the playground while the kids played and every time I walked under this tree I wanted to take a picture. I only did a couple times though. ;) |
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| As cool as the park was, I only got this one pic of the play area. It reminded me of one we played on in Wyoming last summer on our way to South Dakota. And a little like Ryan's Place Park in Logan. |
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| Disc golf in the east in the fall. I am a fan! |
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| Doesn't get better than this, I tell you what! |
Back on the road, we headed along Highway 9 that connects the west side of Vermont with the east. It was a gorgeous drive. (I think I might have said that before? ;) We ended up in Brattleboro in the southeast corner of the state and checked into our hotel. We wanted to be there right at check in time so we could sign up for our private hour of pool time as soon as we could. We chose 6pm (a good after dinner but before bed time), brought our stuff into our room, and then headed back out to Living Memorial Park where we hung out for an hour or so. We played at the park, explored the nearby covered bridge, watched the skateboarders and played some disc golf. Eventually we placed our order for dinner at Vermont Country Deli (highly recommended by my aunt Nikie - she said she'd drive across the country to eat there!) and picked it up a few minutes later just down the street. We took the food a little further down the road to another park on High Street that we had noticed on the way in. We plopped on a bench and inhaled our meal of baked mac and cheese, maple pulled pork sandwich, coleslaw and potstickers (eclectic, sure, but wow! so delicious!). Gregg dropped us off at the hotel after dinner and he drove a few miles down the road to snag us some more donuts (grand total is 36 now) in Putney (like we needed donuts after that dinner!). He got back right at 6 and we headed straight to the pool to swim!
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| Living Memorial Park playground was cute. |
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| It had their own little covered bridge over a ditch! (We totally counted this in our total ;) |
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| I wandered down to the big covered bridge by myself so I had time to read all the signs. This one was talking about native plant restoration after Tropical Storm Irene. |
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| Creamery Bridge. |
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| I realized the one in the park is a replica of this one! So cute! |
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| Not a bad view while throwing discs! |
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| They have everything you could ever want to recreate with at this place - inlcuding skiing! |
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| Best mac and cheese in the entire universe, probably. |
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| A feast! |
We didn't bring the kids' floaters on this trip since we knew swimming was a pretty slim possibility, but that just meant Callie had a great excuse to try swimming herself, which is exactly what she did. WE hung out in the 3 foot area of the pool where the kids were thrilled to realize they could touch the bottom by themselves! With a little motivation from Gregg's "I'll give you a dollar if you can swim across this short end of the pool without touching the bottom" incentive, Cal practiced and practiced and tried and DID IT! She was so excited! We were all so excited! Then Gregg made another offer: "if you can swim across the pool again, I'll give Sam a dollar!" She got right to it! (I was so happy to see her so excited to swim even though her brother was getting the money.) She ended up earning everyone in the family a dollar (and Mom and Dad donated their dollars back to Cal and Sam so the kids each got $2 out of the night). And then she did it again just for fun. It was so thrilling to watch her determination and pure joy and pride as she accomplished this goal. And she talks about it all the time since: "I actually learned how to swim!" Fun moment for sure!
bonus videos!
(these videos were after her successes when she was getting tired, so she didn't
quite make it to the wall on camera)
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| Tried to follow this map and failed, but nice that they had it anyway. |
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| Here's the chapel complete with pulpit and pews. |
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| Yonder are the lean-tos. |
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| Cal and Sam didn't think they'd like to stay in one of these. |
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| Such an interesting slimy looking fungus find! |
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| I spy the top of the ski jump! |
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| Let's check it out! |
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| And back down we go. |
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| More mushrooms - Cal and Sam had good eyes to spot all these. |
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| And another! |
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| Another visit to the bridge and the view through the lattice. |
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| We did a little leaf collecting. Look at these! |
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| Good luck reading these. But I snapped a pic anyway because I like that they have info about interesting things. |
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| Ditto above. |
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| Look both ways as we head back up! |
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| Such a view from the top! |
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| Fall! |
We spent the rest of the day working on our goal of checking off twenty covered bridges from our map as we meandered home on the back roads through the small towns. We ended up with 23! (We didn't get pics of or get to drive on all of them, but we counted them if we saw them, even from a distance.) (I think our overall total is up over 40 now!) It was a long drive back, but we stopped at a couple more parks along the way and listened to audiobooks (finishing one and starting another). When we got back to the condo, we had gromlets for dinner and then an evening home church before bed. (Oh, and I made a quick apple crisp for dessert because I was just feeling like it was the right thing to do!)
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| Dummerston Covered Bridge |
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| This one was cool because it was SO long! It was a fun one to drive through. |
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| The other side of Dummerston. |
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| Finished another audiobook. Cal really loved this one. Gregg and I thought it was a fun story, if not a little on the overly dramatic side at times. |
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| Bowers Bridge. |
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| Out the other side in better light and introducing the new "bridge selfie". |
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| Lincoln Bridge. This one was cool because the green roof made it look green as we drove through. |
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| We ended up on a lot of dirt roads that looked like this! |
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| Cilley Bridge selfie. |
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| Moxley Bridge - you can see a lot of new restoration work on this two-tone beaut. |
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| Our last stop was a park in Montpelier where I didn't take any pics except one of the cool glass in a window in a large clubhouse sort of building next to the swimming pond (yes, pond, not pool ;). |
You will treasure these pictures for decades! What amazing memories!
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