In Georgia, and Safe

It was a wonderful summer in New England, with so many visits with friends and family, as planned. But now we are back in the south, our new home. We hurried back to Georgia in September with the promise that the closing on our home would be Oct. 1. Surprise! Or I guess I should say, no surprise, the builder revised the predicted completion date and the closing won't be until mid-November.  We have been hanging out at Coastal Georgia RV Resort, just 15 minutes from Jekyll Island, and 20 minutes from The Cottages at Jekyll Island where we hope to be living very soon. 

Right now however we are about 160 miles inland, in Ashburn Georgia, at Carroll's Sausage and Country Store (and Georgia Peanut RV park), sitting out Hurricane Matthew in safety.  There was a voluntary evacuation of Jekyll Island and the surrounding area, but we had already decided to leave for a few days just to be safe. (Living in an RV makes it incredibly easy to get out of the way of hurricanes, which is an argument for holding on to the RV after we move into our seaside sticks and bricks home.) The storm is expected to hit Jekyll today, with the worst winds and water levels being at high tide, around 1:30 pm. The predictions I just read are not too dire, with swells at around 15' max and winds at about 30 mph max.  It doesn't look like that will cause too much damage, but we are vigilantly keeping the best outcomes for everyone in our hearts and minds.

While we're sitting out the storm, I'm in my pajamas and in blogging mode, which never seems to happen anymore, so I'd better share a few photos of some of the high points of our summer.  Let me say though, that the greatest moments of our summer, with dear friends and family, will remain undocumented here. It is by no means a statement of their relative importance. 

MASSACHUSETTS

Our first stop was in Massachusetts where we stayed at the Country Aire Campground in Charlemont, near Shelburne Falls and the scenic Bridge of Flowers.

Bridge of Flowers, Shelburne Falls, MA

MAINE

Next we spent about a month in Maine. One of our first stops was on the coast, where our friend Mike showed us around the quaint historical town of Castine. We enjoyed a sailboat cruise around the islands off of Castine, where Rick was in his blue mood. 

Aboard the 56' vintage yacht Guildive, out of Castine, ME

Then we met our friends Steve & Wendy at Acadia National Park for a week of sightseeing, hiking and lobster.

Bass Harbor, ME

Bernard, ME

Northeast Harbor. ME

Bernard, ME

View from Park Loop Rd., Acadia NP, ME

While in Maine we also had lovely visits with the Foggs at Mousam Lake, and the Thomas's at Cold Stream Pond, and got rides on both of their pontoon boats! Lucky us. 

NEW HAMPSHIRE

We stopped briefly in New Hampshire, on the north side of the White Mountains, where Honey and I visited this beautiful mountain stream and swimming hole every day to beat the heat.

VERMONT

Now for a great find in Vermont!  While staying at the Moose River Campground in St. Johnsbury, VT, I discovered Dog Mountain, the quintessential dog-devoted experience created by artist Steve Huneck and his wife Gwen Huneck. 

Roadside sign marking Dog Mountain and Chapel

The Dog Chapel was built by Steve Huneck and is designed to give people and dogs a place to remember and honor dogs they have loved. The walls are covered with notes and photographs that people have left about their dogs.

Inside Dog Chapel

Dog Mountain is an immense piece of property with fields, ponds and woods, interlaced with walking (and running!) paths for people and happy dogs. Always open, always free, and always well cared for.

Honey at Dog Mountain

At the Steve Huneck Gallery (also dog friendly) you can purchase the artist's well known work. All proceeds go to the Friends of Dog Mountain Foundation and the upkeep of the property and chapel. Please visit their website.

Inside the Steve Huneck Gallery at Dog Mountain

 While in Vermont we continued our new found enjoyment of visiting state capitols. I believe this one at Montpelier is one of the smallest and is just as special as all the others we've visited. Each one is so unique, yet formed around the same functional government theme. Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys have a strong presence here.

VT state capitol at Montepelier, VT

While staying in Brattleboro VT we got to a few great contradances in Greenfield MA, and heard some new "high energy dance music with horns" from a band called Elixir.  It feels so good to see the contradance music and dance community that we love, vibrant with young dancers and musicians keeping the tradition alive and making it their own.

THE ROAD SOUTH

After a fast and furious (for us) two week drive back to Georgia through upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, here we are still waiting out the completion of our condo and waiting out the storm, watching the weather channel, me still in my pajamas.

I sure hope to create another post as we continue our transition from full-time RVing to life off the road, and I hope it doesn't take another hurricane to make me do it.

Bye-Bye Vermont : (

Our last (foggy) morning at the Brattleboro North KOA.

Every time I leave the twin states of Vermont and New Hampshire, and neighboring Massachusetts, I get all teary. They were my home for the longest continuous period of my life, where many good friends still live, and I did truly love it here. Oh dear. Well, I also really love our life on the road and am not ready to settle down anywhere just yet. So off we go.

We've had a very full social calendar, visiting with friends almost every day, at their homes, our RV or interesting places new and old. Highlights of our July and August include (but are not limited to):

Hiking and sharing a condo with Laura and Ian in Lincoln, NH.

Meeting many new colleagues, students and friends while teaching for Pratt in Lincoln, NH.

Blueberry picking at Dutton's Farm, as well as sharing several warm and cozy visits with Don and Robin in Mt. Holly, VT.

Visiting Hildene in Manchester, VT with Thomas and Audrey.

Sitting on the back porch next to heaven in Monterey, MA with Wendy and Steve M.

A way-too-quick catch-up dinner with Steve W.

A grand jovial dinner at Alec and Joan's beautiful Vermont home.

Another grand dinner, complete with buttons and bratwurst at Phyllis and Peter's home in Conway, MA.

A restful afternoon visit on Susan and Peter's back deck, overlooking Forest Lake in Winchester, VT.

42nd St. at the Weston Playhouse, featuring Dottie Stanley, in the company of Don, Robin, Chuck and Bonnie.

Three wonderful love-filled days with son Mark and his girlfriend Ahna in their new home, Portland, ME, including a ferry ride to Peaks Island.

Indian cuisine with Mike at Tandoor, also in Portland.

Biking around the campground with our lovely little neighbor Charlotte.

A surprise reunion and subsequent fun with Sandy at the Brattleboro contra dance.

Contra dancing with hundreds of new and old friends in Greenfield, MA.


PHEW! What did I forget?

Wonderful Walker Farm: Dummerston, VT

It is peak produce time in Vermont; the fields are popping with fruits and vegetables, and we can walk to the source, right next door.  We can see the fields from the RV window.

Walker Farm has been here for over 200 years, owned and run by the same family since 1770.  It owes some of its success to the rich land of the Connecticut River Valley, but a great deal of the credit must go to the ingenuity and continuity of the Walker family.  It is not easy to make a farm successful in this day and age. 

 In addition to the fields of typical veggies like corn and tomatoes, they grow an unusual variety of produce, like about six kinds of kale:

... five kinds of cucumbers:

                                                                                                    ... and "purple filet beans."

  

Oh, and a selection of the freshest, most diverse and priciest baby greens ever, and I'm hooked.  (Must have every day for lunch.)  Corn, peaches, blueberries, tomatoes, lettuces, onions, raspberries, radishes, potatoes...the list of Walker's own produce goes on and on. Much of it is organic! They also sell local dairy products, eggs, and Walpole Creamery ice cream.  Just too good.

This is what makes Walker's a destination. The parking lot is never empty.

 

Then, as if that weren't enough, Walker's is also a grower and purveyor of award winning annuals, perennials, and larger landscaping stock, all looking hale and hardy.  Here is their selection of shade annuals:

Vermont is known for its abundance of small and organic farms, providing locally sourced foods to restaurants and farmstands along the road, like Walkers. These are the little pleasures that make life sweet, don't you think?  Thank you Vermont and thank you Walker Farm.

Vermont and New Hampshire: Unique Local Phenomena

Being here in Vermont is a return to an earlier time and place in both of our lives, as well as in US history. I lived nearby in Keene, NH for about 20 years, and Rick and I lived in Mt. Holly, VT for about four before we moved to Chicago in 2002.  But beyond our personal histories, Vermont, like most of New England, is just so deeply settled. People have been living here for so long that its history is not only visible everywhere, but it seems like I can feel it in the curves of the roads as they follow the streams and larger river valleys, in the pastures, in the stone walls.  Time moves slowly here - in the 10+ years since we lived here it looks like there has been almost no development, in fact many things have devolved. (Of course we've been through a hard-hitting recession during that time.) People live simple lives, many of them closely connected to a minimalist kind of agricultural dependency on the land. No evidence of big corporate agri-business around here - just small family farms.

It's hard to believe that Vermont and New Hampshire were almost completely deforested for sheep farming in the 1800's. Now there are trees everywhere. It's a challenge to get photographs of anything besides the trees!  

We're at the KOA on Rt. 5, about halfway between Brattleboro and Putney, VT. I'll say more about the immediate area in my next post. For now I'll just share a few spots we've visited in the past week.

One of the places I was really looking forward to revisiting is Burdick's, just across the river in Walpole, NH. It is truly one of the areas best kept secrets.  Burdick's makes internationally renown chocolate, but is so unprepossessing that you'd never know it was there. In this classic little white clapboard town, it is just one of a handful of businesses in the homely building in the photo below. There isn't even a sign saying it's Burdick's. 

The best thing at Burdick's, in my opinion, is the hot chocolate, made simply of shaved chocolate (your choice of dark, mild or white) with just enough steamed milk to make it drinkable. OMG, it is like nothing you've ever tasted. It is so intense that the first time you may not even be able to finish a cup. It is complete sensual rapture. 

In the Walpole location Burdick's has a chocolate store, a cafe and a restaurant. I've never tried the restaurant, but love the little cafe (above). It's very warm and cozy and welcoming, with hot drinks of all kinds, fresh baked croissants and scones, as well as about 15 other kinds of pastries and dessertish things (below).  I've been there twice already at 7 AM when they are just opening the doors and taking the croissants and scones out of the oven. Oh boy. Breakfast perfection.

And here's another southern Vermont favorite that I was looking forward to revisiting: The Vermont Country Store, with two locations in Weston and Rockingham.  We stopped at the original store, in Weston. 

It has two large compound buildings, one of which houses two restaurants: the classic Bryant House for a sit down meal, and the equally classic Mildred's ice cream shop (below).

The other is a rambling multi-roomed general store with an abundance of everything you can imagine, from clothing, to foods and candies, to toys and housewares, all with an emphasis on tradition.  Here's the cheese shop:




It's a great place to Christmas shop or to find a little something that you don't need in the RV. I found a few excellent dish towels.

In our new explorations of the area we've come across the longest covered bridge in Vermont, that crosses the West River in West Dummerston (above), and the ruins of Madame Sherri's Castle near Mt. Wantastiquet (below), thanks to our friend Steve.

The "castle" was a grand home at one time, that fell into disrepair and burnt down in 1962. The ruins make for some interesting exploring.

We've also made our usual visits to local farmer's markets, the one below is in Norwich, VT, where we also happened to run into an old friend of Rick's selling produce from her Four Springs Farm in nearby Royalton. There was some nice fiddle and hammer dulcimer music being played as well.

  

Yesterday we had another new experience with a drive up the Mount Equinox Skyline Drive, in Sunderland, near Manchester, VT.  (Manchester is a very popular, high-end kind of destination with lots of places to eat, lodge and shop.)

The toll road is managed by the Carthusian Monastery that can be seen from the summit of Mt. Equinox. The views from the drive and the summit are spectacular, stretching from the Adirondacks of NY in the east to the White Mountains of NH in the west. It's a great place to get a sense of the vastness of the surrounding mountains and the TREES!

At the summit, the Monastery has build a viewing (and warming) center that also houses some information about the Carthusians. There is a network of hiking trails leaving from the center that look like they'd be pretty interesting. It can of course get cold and windy at the top, but it wasn't too bad the day we were there.

 On the way home Rick spotted this collection of rock sculptures or cairns, in the Winhall River in Bondville, so we got out to take a closer look, along with about 20 other people.

Well, it turns out this place is a hot local controversy. A young local man started building them about a month ago after the death of his dog, and he was eventually joined by other people, including families with children.  The collection grew to over one hundred piles of balanced rocks in the river.

But not everyone appreciated the spontaneous community art project. Just days ago another local man took a rake and knocked every single one down.  Local news reports quote him as saying it was a "desecration of nature."  I don't know, do you see that?

In response, community members rallied together and rebuilt the cairns. By the time we saw them on August 3, there were again hundreds, with more being built as we watched. I don't really understand the objection, and felt only gratitude that someone took the time to built all these little works of art. Now I feel even more gratitude to the people who got together to rebuild them. I agree whole-heartedly with one person who was interviewed, that this is such a healthy, wholesome and creative community endeavor, that brings people together in a safe, productive way, with such a fascinating result! I wish more small towns had events like this that they could be proud of and that people from all around would come and appreciate. It required no fund raising, no grants, no committees and generated no bags of garbage. It's put Bondville on the map! I hope they can heal whatever rift it caused, move on and enjoy.