Full Day in Vermont

Today was our only full day in Vermont. In the morning, we woke up for a quick hike up Spruce Peak to get a panoramic shot of Mount Mansfield. The views were pretty good, but the mountains around here weren't nearly as vibrant as New Hampshire, and I think that's because of the increased number of pine trees mixed in on the mountains. One thing that was strikingly different during this hike was the smell of pine trees during the hike. Vermont has trees that everyone associates with Pine trees (and Christmas), as opposed to the pine that we're used to in Colorado being more like a faint vanilla smell. So that provided for a unique hiking experience that we weren't used to. On our way back to the trailhead, we headed down a small 0.1 mile detour to get to Sterling Pond. Sterling Pond was a nice pond and a good stop, but it wasn't all that interesting since the sun was facing the wrong way and because there weren't any color-changing trees around the lake. The hike ended up being just under 3.5 miles and was 1,200 feet in elevation gain.

We then started to relax for the remainder of the day by first stopping at the Ben and Jerry's factory in Stowe. They weren't doing any tours due to renovations, so we just got some ice cream and went on our way to Burlington. In Burlington, we walked along Church Street which reminded me a lot of Pearl Street in Boulder. We went to a couple of breweries and came to the conclusion that no one in the East knows what a good beer is. Breweries here seem to just brew the classic german beers and IPAs and don't do anything too wild or experiment. There's nothing wrong with that, but those types of beers aren't all that exciting to us. In the late afternoon, we walked along the Colchester Causeway for about a mile which is a bike path in the middle of Lake Champlain. We ended the evening by having dinner at the Shanty by the Shore which had a fantastic view of the sunrise. The food was good, but not worth the 45-minute wait to be seated.