Last stop, Shelburne, VT. Been here before, but never like this.

As we understand it, the weather in New England has been pretty miserable this summer.  Since we have not been in the northeast since we left in July, we have not experienced this issue firsthand.  Apparently, it has rained most weekends, there has been flooding, and overall, the weather has been very wet.  That means when we crossed back into the States, moving into our Shelburne, VT campsite, we encountered our first stretch of rainy weather, and several activities were affected.  Firstly, our campsite was very wet, even on a sunny day (we had a couple), and when it rained, the ground was so saturated, we basically had a large puddle, or small pool, where the picnic table was located.  Steven’s golf game was rained out, and we spent some time inside the 300 sq ft camper as rain pelted down.  Why’d we even come back?  Ohh, that’s right, we came back to see #1 son, who is living in Burlington, after graduating from the University of Vermont.  That boy is working his ass off as a veterinary technician, farm hand, and landscape worker, as he applies to veterinary programs across the country.  Time to spoil the kid with food and some entertainment, and that’s what we did.

Let’s see, we all went bowling on a Saturday night, and Judy basically out-bowled everyone on the lane. When it wasn’t raining, we got a chance to play disc golf (frisbee golf).  There was a wonderful nine-hole disc golf course associated with Village Community Park in Williston, VT, and Judy kept score.  We fed the boy a steak dinner as a home cooked meal and made sure he joined us at a couple of other restaurants including a Hibachi steak house.  It was great to spend so much time with #1 son, we’re grateful for the opportunity.

Disc Golf in Williston

This was not our first visit to the Burlington area, as we were here to attend a graduation ceremony in May, so we are pretty familiar with it.  There are no RV campsites in Burlington proper so we settled for the next best location, which was in Shelborne, VT, literally 7 ½ miles due south of downtown Burlington.  Shelburne really has a lot to offer for attractions and interesting things to do.  There are walking trails at Shelburne Bay Park which follow the banks of Shelburne Bay, a part of Lake Champlain.  Of course, this trail was a bit muddy, so we headed back to the 1 ½ mile recreational trail.  In addition to the walk along the lake, we visited two great attractions / museums within a 5-minute drive from our campsite.

First, there was the Shelburne Museum, a unique experience of American history, art, and design.  The Museum includes 39 distinct structures on 45 acres, filled with beautiful, fascinating, and whimsical objects. There is American folk art, French Impressionist paintings, historic New England architecture, duck decoys, circus animals, dolls, a 103-year-old carousel, a covered bridge as well as a collection of rail cars, and a railroad depot complete with a telegraph machine.  The Museum was founded by Electra Havemeyer Webb who collected the everyday objects that had been part of American life for generations—furniture, pottery, quilts, weathervanes, and more—and filled her homes in New York and Shelburne, Vermont, with antiques.  When Mrs. Webb founded Shelburne Museum in 1947, it was at first a place to preserve her family’s collection of horse-drawn carriages.  Then, from the countryside across New England and New York, Mrs. Webb found historic buildings that would provide appropriate settings for her collections, and she relocated them to the Museum grounds: houses, barns, a meeting house, a one-room schoolhouse, a lighthouse, a jail, a general store, a covered bridge, and the 220-foot steamboat Ticonderoga.  I want to make sure everybody reading this understands that this woman, Mrs. Webb, arranged and paid to have an 892-ton steamship moved from Champlain across 7 miles of farmland and onto the Museum grounds to be part of the Shelburne Museum.  Like the whole steamship!  This is a collection that has something for everyone, and it’s all situated on a beautiful village-like campus of historic New England.  We spent a full day exploring the grounds and gardens. “Wow” is all I can say.

103-Year-Old Carousel

So, as interesting as the Shelburne Museum was, we then got ourselves over to Shelburne Farms for some trail walking and a cheese tasting.  But really, we discovered so much more.  Shelburne Farms is now a 4000-acre organic agricultural learning center complete with 110 Brown Swiss dairy cows who produce milk to make their famous Shelburne Farms Cheese.  The main farm building also houses a bakery and a craftsman style custom woodworking business.  There is a children’s learning center, barn animals, a chicken coop, and a milking station so that children can milk a cow.  There is also a real commercial dairy barn and pastures for the cows to graze.  There is an Inn on site and the estate sits right up against the shores of Lake Champlain.  The estate and farm are the handywork of Eliza Osgood “Lila” Webb, the youngest daughter of William H. Vanderbilt, one of the world’s wealthiest men when he died in 1885. Her inheritance enabled her and her husband, William Seward, to realize their personal vision for a grand agricultural estate in Shelburne. It was at Shelburne Farms that we had our much-anticipated cheese tasting adventure.  But this was way more than just a cheese tasting! We were driven around the grounds in an open aired wagon while a tour guide provided the history of the grounds, the barn (which is a magnificent building), the cows, the milking process, and the cheese making process.  The estate was really a hub of agricultural innovation during its heyday (1880-1936).  We were there when the cows were rounded up from the pasture and herded into the milking barn to collect the milk for the following days’ cheese production.  I gotta be honest, after seeing the entire cheese making process starting with the milking of the cows, I did think the cheese tasted much more distinct and creamier than the standard store-bought cheese.  I just wish they had served a bit of wine, and maybe some crackers, to go along with the cheese.  That must have been a different tasting tour.  LOL!  There is so much to experience there, we spent the entire day at the Farm!

To be perfectly honest, as we packed up the camper to leave our last stop on this adventure, we’re a bit sad.  Where did the time go?  We packed up to start our adventure on a hot & humid July day and returned 72 days later on a rainy Monday afternoon, after sitting in 90 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic.  It was good to be home.

If you have been keeping up with the blog and reading along with our adventures, then I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your time & attention.  We hope you have had as much fun reading this blog as we have had telling you of our explorations.  And a special thank you to those followers who took the time to comment or send a note of commendation. Not wanting to bore you, our dear reader, we will be posting more sporadically to this blog until we start our next adventure in December. The planning has already started for a trip south, along the “Redneck Riviera”.  And before you Google “Redneck Riviera” I can tell you that this refers to the beaches along the Emerald Coast from Pensacola to Panama City and on into Alabama and Mississippi.  Please look for future updates as we continue to tell… the Rest of the Story.