Bigger is Not Better.

Vermont seems to have taken this adage to heart. Everything here seems to be a celebration of smallness. The towns pivot around independent general stores with hand-crafted signs and creaky floors. Many of the homes have tidy, family sized gardens. The farms are not industrial in size and the fields of corn, hay and wheat, fit easily between wooded streams, not forcing the land to do their bidding, but rather working with it. Many of the dairys have 10 cows or less. There are no billboards, few chain stores and the towns can easily be thought of as villages or hamlets without irony. Even the hills are small. The Green Mountains don’t pretend to be jagged and fierce, they just gently ripple.

(Okay, maybe Middlebury Gap missed the memo on the beauty of smallness with it’s shocking 12 to 15 % grade! That was a doozy!)

Yes, Vermont is lovely. The people are kind and all seem to somehow smile through their face masks. It is rubbing off on Oakley, who has been a shining star of a traveling partner. He is down right joyful and tonight made us dinner AND set up the tent. When I grumbled today about the heat and the hills it was Oakley that said, “Stop complaining. This is beautiful.”

Now, we sit by the side of Lake Champlain, planning our ride up through the chain of islands known as the Grand Isle, to the Canadian border. He is an incredible traveling partner; he will eat anything, is as strong as an ox, deals with druggery, and is a goof ball.

Short and simple tonight, maybe Vermont is rubbing off on me too.