Flashback Friday(on a Saturday...): Roadtrip to Vermont

One of our goals while living in New England was to visit as many of those little tiny states as we could. We did fairly well: Maine, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont (plus several drives through Connecticut). 

Just a couple months before we headed south, we finally made it to Vermont for the weekend. We decided on Brattleboro, as it wasn't too terribly far from Boston. We knew we didn't want to try to tackle a roadtrip longer than 3 hours, so Brattleboro it was.

We headed out of town, and, for the first time, really, headed into western Mass. Let me just say: once you get out of Boston, you are pretty much in the country. Massachusetts is not that bustling. I think that, having grown up in the South, I just kind of assumed the whole state was teeming with people. Not so. 

Being the patriotic souls that we are, we stopped for lunch in Concord. There was basically nothing in Concord, but the pizza place we stopped at was excellent. We liked the pizza we ordered so much that we recreated it when we got back home. Claire won over a bunch of burly firefighters, so...all in a day's work.

We stopped once between Concord and Brattleboro because we saw an interesting coffee/ice cream/antiques place. The ice cream was good, Brad thought the coffee was pretty good, we didn't really pay too much attention to the antiques, but the bathroom signs made the stop worth it, for sure.

Friends of ours had explained to us that within New England, Vermont is considered the weird, hippy, "out there" state. Within Vermont, Brattleboro is considered weird, hippy, and "out there." We were definitely interested in seeing what that looked like.

It looked like a lot of things, actually. Like almost more bicycles than cars, solar panels on almost all houses, "shop local" signs everywhere, words like "locally sourced" proudly displayed in restaurants, stores selling hippy clothes and paraphernalia. It was the kind of place that made me a little self-conscious about driving an SUV. But it was beautiful. It was nestled in the Green Mountains and had taken great pains to preserve the original buildings of downtown. 

We ate dinner at a REALLY yummy restaurant on the river and walked over the bridge to the New Hampshire state line. Just because.

Our restaurant

Crossing the river to get to...

...New Hampshire.

Our love for AirBnB paid off again; we stayed in an ADORABLE little cabin in a family's backyard. It was just too cute and quite perfect for a weekend. And, I think we only paid $85/night.

Seriously. How cute is this?

Sun room. I totally laid on that rug and took a nap when Claire was konked out.

A rather unfortunate element of our Vermontian adventure was that Claire decided it was time to have Opinions and Feelings and Self-Expression. It made our visit pretty miserable on some level, as we were dealing with an incessant flow of Disgruntled Sounds and Whines. Eating out was rendered quite difficult because there was nothing to stop the Frustrated Noises. Loud Frustrated Noises. It was the first moment of our parenting career where we realized that we couldn't just take our baby out and expect her to be on cruise control. We were definitely going to have to be on alert and prepared at all times. It was a blow to our happiness. (It also inhibited my interest in taking pictures...)

Views around Brattleboro

If you're going to hang out on the side of the road, you might as well have a couch, right?

View of the mountains in between buildings.

Back when she still had a paci and needed help walking.

It was a fun visit to Vermont, but Brad and I were glad to get back to Boston and to a routine that didn't bring out the Whines and Cries quite so much. Our initiation into Toddlerdom, perhaps? Bless.