burrr-lington

For those of you (like me 1 week ago) who have never been to Burlington, VT, let me just tell you it is a place worth driving 6 1/2 hours on rural back roads from Maine, through New Hampshire and then Vermont to get to. It is a fun, stunningly beautiful little city kept local and not too touristy by the 2 colleges (and the now famous bar Nectar's where the band Phish started out) that call it home. AND, we get to go back in May for me to run in the marathon! (I don't know why it is that I can't just schedule another weekend away. I need to run a MARATHON as an excuse? Jeesh!)

Allow me to tell you that on our trip home, there was a lot of talk circling around the car about making Burlington our home.

I mean c'mon! An eco-friendly and people friendly state where we have equal marriage rights? Sounds like Maine...except for the rights.

Okay, off the soap box. On with the tour. This is the lovely Church Street, a cobblestone pedestrian-only corridor of charming shops (minus the gouge-you prices) and lovely eateries.

Lake Champlain, looking out to the Adirondacks and upstate New York.

Matt and Ange looking every bit the cold that it was. Try -2 with a hearty wind chill.

We were in love with our hotel (a Best Western!) which had the comfiest beds, a beautiful pool and hot tub, workout room, AND milk and cookies served nightly. (I'll go on record saying this was my favorite part.)

As mentioned previously, we had a really, REALLY good time at Lake Champlain chocolates. In our discussions about moving to Burlington (mostly a whim but you never know...) Matt and Sandi went back and forth making fun of Ange and I for our slight excessiveness with chocolate. Some serious insults were flying about how they would be dragging us out of the free sample area with chocolate stains on our faces and eventually would have to put WANTED posters up in the entry to deter us. You know, you really shouldn't make fun of people who have chocolate addiction. It just isn't very nice.

At $38 a pound, this would become an expensive habit and you can see where the sample counter comes in handy. They made the BEST, most out-of-this-world dark hot chocolate I have ever had. (And allegedly they make chocolate milk shakes in the summer so I will DEFINITELY be returning here in May.)

Then we toured the Magic Hat brewing company. Now this place was FUN. You get to drink all the free samples you want (I'm telling you, they have got the golden ticket in Burlington) and I finally found a beer that I LOVE. It's called #9 and apparently it's the "gateway" beer (who knew there was such a thing?) that gets non-beer drinkers liking beer. Again, who knew we needed help?
The Mardi Gras theme.

The actual factory where they make and bottle this golden nectar.

Matt played us a little tune...

As a side note...knowing that it was to be so bitterly cold in Burlington and that I was trading my poopy diapers in my purse for cash and a photo ID, I decided I would wear Sandi's fabulous, over-the-top suede, FUR-TRIMMED (faux), knee-length coat that I think she has maybe worn 1 1/2 times. This coat had so much personality, so much pazaaz, so much, well, coat, that it earned itself a name. A single name: Roxy. They all made fun of me, but let me tell you, I was the one laughing when I was toasty warm and they were all freezing themselves silly in their run-of-the-mill LLBeans.

You get a glimpse of Roxy here:

I don't know...but I sure was happy there.

Maybe it was the plethora of expensive chocolate, the free beer or the liberal spirit in the (frigid!) air...

...we just had such a good time!
(see Roxy again? Warm like a wood stove, warm. It should be. I think she weighs like 10 pounds.)

You see, the trip was under the guise of going to see our favorite singer, Brandi Carlile (www.brandicarlile.com) just as the May return trip is under the guise of a marathon. Although the venue was standing room only and the sound was less than perfect, it would be impossible to not fall absolutely in love with this immensely talented young woman with a voice that makes me green with envy. Sandi snuck her camera in and got a couple of great shots, but she also got caught, was told "no professional photographs" which would have been an HUGE compliment to her and her Nikkon D40 except that they confiscated her camera and made her erase all the pictures. Luckily there was no arrest, no mug shots and, most importantly, we were back to the hotel before all the other greedy guests stole all the cookies.

We brought the girls home some Lake Champlain Chocolates chocolate lollipops (money which might have made a bigger impression on their college savings account but, hey, we left them for 3 nights.)

Ella was all smiles.

Maya was too...

...until she went into some sort of chocolate-induced stupor.

But, alas, she recovered.

We brought Ella a stained glass kit which she loved (and I had to finish),

which left her bragging about how hers was much more complicated that the fine artisan piece of stained glass that hangs in the nearby pane.

Then...as we attempted to survive our somewhat bumpy re-entry from serene freedom to crying babies and messy living rooms, we coped in the ways we knew best.

I tried to swindle yet more chocolate from our unsuspecting five-year-old...

And Sandi sat and had a beer.

(P.S. Thanks Gram and Gramp for taking our girlies so we could go be partners instead of mommies for a few days.)