We are staying south of Burlington, along Highway 7 which parallels Lake Champlain at the Vermont-New York border. The drive here was so pretty, through tall, treed Vermont hills, still no moose spotted yet, but lots of "watch out for moose" signs. Maybe they put those up to increase tourism!

Here are some of the sights through the big windows as we go along Hwy 2-89 in Vermont:



That gold dome in the last pic is the capitol building in Montpelier. The capitol looked to be about the size of Placerville from the highway. Kinda looked like a cute town but we didn't stop.

Nearly every travel day, at some point this happens.

Thursday, May 26

Katie and I got the oil changed in the car, then headed to the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory, just down the street.

We took the factory tour, where they show you folks actually making the bears, and how they are made. It was actually a very interesting tour:

If I need to buy a bear for anyone (like Katie needs another stuffed animal), I might buy it from this company. They use stuffing machines recycled from WWII lifesaver-stuffing machines, the bears have a lifetime warrantee (you send back an eye and they'll send you a new bear) and best of all, they're not outsourcing all the jobs to China (yet).

After the tour, I went to a bank and got some Canadian cash for when we head up to Montreal on Saturday. Also, Katie and I drove over to the Shelburne Museum. It looks really neat--we'll check it out tomorrow.

Friday, May 27

Katie and I went over to the Shelburne Museum today, and it was so fabulous. It's a contender with Williamsburg, Virginia. It is a private museum (like Williamsburg), started in the 1940s by a family of collectors here. They collected all sorts of Vermont antiques, and then started collecting buildings too. There is the last passenger steam-powered paddleboat ferry that took a million folks up Lake Champlain from 1906 to 1953. It is the Ticonderoga; here it is:

It was carried overland two miles from Lake Champlain over frozen ground, on train tracks in the winter of 1953-4. You can see a little movie onboard that shows the trials they went through trying to get it here:


yes that's a freight train; the Ticonderoga is waiting to cross the tracks to the other side

Here is the priciest stateroom onboard. It went for $3 a night:

Everything (including the boiler room, kitchen, etc) was beautifully restored (a private doner gave $1 million a few years ago do restore it). Here is the mirror on the main staircase:

Next to the Ticonderoga is a lighthouse, taken off a rock in Lake Champlain and brought here in 1952:

The grounds are gorgeous (they put Williamsburg and other places like this to shame). Here is one garden; yes the tulips were taller than Katie:

There were lots of houses restored and furnished to their original time period (one is restored to 1946-50; I didn't see that one but it sounded neat). Here is the inside of one from the 1700s. Every room was stenciled:

This tiny mirror, made from a scrap of broken mirror set into wood, was really beautiful to me. You can see the reflection of the back stairs in it:

Some buildings housed collections. One had a collection of 25 antique quilts, some more complicated than any quilts I've ever seen. Here is a medalion from a 1800s quilt that was embroidered all over with letters and numbers. She was a master embroiderer:

A floor of one old house held a collection of old dolls and dollhouses. I was fascinated by all the tiny silver sets, paintings, and especially the kitchen sets. They were hard to photograph (no flashes were allowed), but here is one nice dollhouse kitchen:

There was a huge (600 foot) curved building built to house a few circus collections. One guy who worked for the railroad carved thousands of figures at night over a period of 50 years. His son continued after the dad died, finishing the circus and all of the individual onlookers. It was too big to photograph with one picture; here is part of it:

Most of the rest of the building was another hand-carved circus set, that of a parade. It was impossible to photograph, because the parade is 520 feet long. Each animal is about 8 inches tall; there was everything, including yaks, circus cages with rhinos, etc., bands of clowns playing music, etc. Here is the old 1920s movable circus carousel. Katie rode it three times:

This museum is so wonderful I think it's worth a trip to northern Vermont just to see it. Plus you can see Lake Champlain and its islands, and also there is a farm designed by Frederick Olmstead (did he do everything or what?) nearby, that is also a museum now, as well as still being a working farm, and it has animals that kids can pet and stuff like that. I'm disappointed that we didn't make it there, but that's how it goes. Mark is excited to get to Montreal; I don't think he'd want to spend another day here just to see a farm. He's not as into the old stuff as I am; he'll like the city of Montreal better, I think.

I don't speak French, just very bad Spanish. I hope that'll be enough to get us through the Canadian countryside; we should be up there for almost two weeks. Hopefully we'll have Internet coverage...