Dream stream

After a comfortable night's sleep we awoke in our mountain retreat.  Instead of hitting the road straight after breakfast, we paddled in a stream and built dams and little cairns and such-like.

Then down into the village of Stowe, which is one of those picture-perfect New England places.  We found a cafe for coffee and snacks, then eventually moved on down the road for some lunch.  Finally we prised ourselves away and went in search of a hike.

The hike turned into more stream-paddling, and even swimming in shallow water-holes.  There aren't so many completely perfect moments in life, but I have come across them sometimes on warm days in cool streams with my family - and so I did today.  In fact I felt so entirely contented that I didn't even mind a bit when the Man told me he'd just dropped the camera in the water and it may never be the same again. 

We then had a long drive home (made longer by my erratic navigation efforts) but made it home safely.  What a happy day it's been, as good a birthday as I've ever had.

Al fresco shopping

Burlington is a modest-sized city on the shore of the very lovely Lake Champlain.  It has a lot of charm and character, and it's an attractive place to spend a sunny summer's day. It's probably a fun place to be a student - it's home to the University of Vermont.

But the biggest draw according to all the tourist brochures is...wait for it...a pedestrianized shopping street.  Such as you would see in almost any English town.  I mean, it's a good one, with interesting shops, pavement cafes, street performers etc... but isn't it a sad indictment of American town planning that the "Church Street Marketplace" is regarded as such a novelty?

Another big attraction in Burlington is the ECHO aquarium.  It's more a hands-on environmental science centre - not all that many fish to look at to be honest - but we had a few hours of fun there.

Tonight we're in the oldest purpose-built ski lodge in the mountain resort of Stowe.  It features "vintage 1940s and 1970s decor".  Shabby-chic, but actually quite a nice change from the usual interchangeable hotels.  We're looking forward to enjoying the fresh mountain air in the morning.

The scoop on Vermont's top attraction

And here we are, getting that change of scene I'd been hoping for (and a fair bit of drizzle into the bargain). 

We're up in Vermont, the Green Mountain State, staying in Burlington - which happens to be a Fair Trade Town.  Fair trade has ended up featuring rather heavily today, as our main visit of the day was to Ben & Jerry's original ice-cream factory.  B&J's have pledged that by 2013 all the ingredients in their ice-cream that can be fair trade will be.  Yay!

We took the factory tour, led by a guide who truly believes in the quality of the B&J's product and enjoys quite a lot of it (he is partly paid in ice-cream - 15 pints a week).  He was entertaining - told some cow jokes (very a-moo-sing) - and explained how the factory works.

Of course the tour ended with an ice-cream sample (Stephen Colbert's Americone Dream), followed by a visit to the "grave-yard" of some of the 350 or so discontinued flavours and more ice-cream/milk-shake from the scoop shop.  It is extraordinarily good stuff, but personally I don't mind if I don't see any more of it for quite a while.

Domestic idle

So, it's been another undemanding enough day, the kids doing their thing, me doing mine.  A stroll down the road together for ice-cream in the afternoon.  The Girl cycling to the library this evening.  It has been hot and sticky again - is that more or less likely to make a person irritable than cold and drizzly?

I'm itching for a change of scene - heck, even the novel I've just finished reading is set in this town!

Luckily, tomorrow is another day, when anything is possible...

Books etc

I had a good meeting this morning (see yesterday's blogpost), followed by a useful conversation with the owner of a new restaurant.  She not only already serves fair trade coffee and bananas but also wants to support Friends of Five Rivers in various ways.

The rest of the day went off as usual - yet more boat-building for the Boy and his buddy, and library-work for the Girl, followed by skating.  Tonight, a toad-rescue from the pool. 

Anyone got any reading recommendations for me?  I recently enjoyed Kate Atkinson's latest, Started Early Took My Dog, and now I'm reading a novel by a local (to here) author, David Klein called Stash - don't know if it's available in the UK but it would probably make a good choice for a book group, if you're in one.  Completely different, Ben Goldacre's Bad Science is very readable and well-worth your time.  But what else should I be reading this summer?

Fair sailing

Kids in the UK are in their first week of summer vacation.  My own kids have been off school so long already that I've lost track of time.  It must be more than a month already.  The days and weeks all roll into each other.

The Girl has no camp this week, but she's putting in all the hours she can at the library being a "book buddy".  And the Boy continues to spend all his available hours with his own favourite buddy.  They have built quite a flotilla of boats - it's costing me a fortune in sticky tape, but it keeps them out of mischief.

I've been preparing for a fair trade town-related breakfast meeting tomorrow.  It's encouraging to see that the FT movement over here is really starting to grow.  When I first began looking into FT Town campaigns in the US, in late 2008, there were only seven declared FTTs in the whole of the USA.  Now there are 23, including major cities like Boston and Chicago, and there are 40 on-going campaigns.  More than half of the 50 States have FTT activity going on somewhere - including Texas.  Here in the Capital Region of New York we have one declared FT Town (Ballston Spa), plus my own town's active campaign, and in the last few months a Fair Trade University (Siena) and the USA's first ever Fair Trade High School (Emma Willard).  There's a way to go before the US catches up with the UK (where there are more than 500 FT Towns and thousands of FT schools), but every step heads in the right direction.

We've got it covered

You may or may not know that a swimming pool needs tucking up at night under a special blanket, to keep it warm.  The blanket, or solar cover, also adds warmth from the sun if it's left on the water during the day.

The day we bought this house the vendors presented us with a huge piece of blue plastic bubble wrap, which is basically all a solar cover is.  We had fun cutting it to size our first summer here.  But as we discovered at the start of this swimming season, a cover doesn't last forever - ours had started to disintegrate.  Having got to the point where half of it had ripped and the pool filter kept clogging up with little shreds of blue plastic, we decided we'd better invest in a new one.

Here it is!  Just in time to conserve the warmth generated by the recent heatwave, now that summer has suddenly turned cooler (and wetter) again.