Vermont notes
Cute, quiet, cozy month during the holidays
There's a cacophony of wild geese at every glance. Cows moo as a dairy farm smell pierces your nostrils. A pillowy blanket of snow covers the world and hugs you. Tucked away here in Vermont, things are just cozier.
We arrived during the shift to winter. It snowed within the first few days and the snow never left — it filled us with childlike giddiness. As you follow our adventures, you’ll see that we just spent five weeks in Vermont after coming from frenetic Brooklyn.
Our cottage was situated on Lake Champlain with the Adirondack Mountains in the background to our west. Lake Champlain is over 100 miles long and extends up past Burlington and into Canada separating Vermont from New York State. Middlebury was our closest city — a cute New England liberal arts town that has a famous college.
The state of Vermont is basically all farmland surrounded by small green mountains — Vermont means "green mountains" in French ("vert mont") and was anglicized where they dropped the “t” in “vert.” Here’s a little geography trick to remember which one Vermont is: it's the state in between the "news” sandwiched in between New York and New Hampshire.
This place is tiny. Vermont is the second least-populated state in the US after Wyoming. The state's capital Montpelier is the least-populous state capital in the US, while its most-populous city, Burlington, is the least-populous to be a state's largest.
Vermont has a long history of freedom and has championed liberal principles. In fact, they were the first to abolish slavery as the Vermont Republic before any other states or colonies. It then incorporated as a state and became the first place for women's suffrage in the union. Things start to makes sense as to why a guy like Bernie Sanders would come from here.
And like Mr. Bernie Sanders, folks in New England are direct. I get the impression that they have little patience for imbeciles. New Englanders have a snoot about them. As evidenced by driving style, everyone rides your ass here in New England. Don’t get me wrong, many of the people we interacted with were friendly in many situations, but generally I felt a tinge of unfriendliness, or perhaps it’s just a lack of “saving face” with all of the fake pleasantries that we do for each other out in the west.
So in that sense, I respect New Englanders and Vermonters (yes, that’s what they call people from Vermont). Maybe the weather has something to do with it. Bill Burr has a good bit about people in the New England state of Massachusetts who’ve become bitter because they’re constantly having to brace for a cold shitty winter.
We went to Burlington, Vermont which felt more French than expected, but to be fair you’re less than an hour from Quebec. Burlington was quaint — we hit up a nice Italian restaurant, a barcade, and happened to be there for the grand opening of an elaborate candy store that some dudes from Nova Scotia started.
We’re from Portland, Oregon, so we had to see the other Portland—Portland, Maine. It was a quick 24 hour trip. Portland felt more like Boston, whereas Vermont felt more French/Quebec vibes. Portland was bizarre, with lots of seafood and weed shops (not unlike the our Portland). We may have arrived at a bad time but it was sleepy, salty, and stoned. We’ll have to go back in the summer.
Back to Vermont… we went wine tasting and liked it. There's certainly a wine scene here but they’re using different grape varietals that we were unfamiliar with but what we had was quite good. There's ski resorts too. The tallest peak in Vermont is like 4,200 feet with plenty of vertical elevation for shredding all winter.
The food, the people, the culture — seems like everything is local in Vermont. The beef is from the farm up the road. The cheese curds are from another farm 20 minutes east. The maple syrup oozes out of every supermarket in the state. The coffee was roasted in the nearby tiny 2,000 person town of Vergennes.
Everything coming from small, tight-knit groups of passionate locals who want to live free and live well. I recommend a visit if you get the chance.
