Wednesday is my day off at camp, and it was an especially happy off day because Linda flew in the night before. What a bracing breeze, to see her stepping off the plane!
After breakfast yesterday, we set off to climb Mount Monadnock--by some accounts, the world's most-climbed peak. I'll post about that when I'm able to download pictures again, but for now the important thing is that it only took 2 1/2 hours to climb, so we were down in time for lunch in Keene. After a great lunch at a restaurant called The Stage, we decided we still had time to drive to Vermont. (All kinds of time, as it turned out: it's only about 45 minutes from there across the state line--New England is teensy-tiny.)
So, yes, we "bagged" Vermont. But I'm not feeling particularly conflicted about it, since we really did have time to walk around downtown Brattleboro, and found some terrific coffee at Mocha Joe's. And the antiques! Back home in Colorado, something is an antique if it's no longer stocked at Wal-Mart. I honestly think you could drive an empty truck to Vermont, load it down with antiques bought at retail prices, and drive back to Colorado and make a fortune. Does anybody do this?
Brattleboro's downtown sits right on the Connecticut River, and the storefronts are the kind that you actually care about. There was an artistic co-op featuring really first-class artists; none of those people making dream-catchers in their garage. And then, to top it all off, we drove by one of those famous covered bridges. What a deal. (As an aside, one of our staffers makes the odd association between the Amish and covered bridges--she was sure that you only see them in Amish country.)
So . . . it all comes down to Rhode Island. Do we make the break for it, or do we "earn" it? I'm still leaning toward letting Rhode Island slip through our fingers . . .
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Thanks, Kyle! Now I've got a reason to visit Rhode Island, although it's too late this year. Any state that had the first Baptist church can't be totally insignificant.
As for you, Rob: you hit the nail on the head. I think the Vermont/Rhode Island dichotomy was wishy-washy, and I don't have the faintest idea of what a "symbol of spiritual and environmental awareness" means. All I know is that you get a pretty vista from the summit (on clear days you can see all the way to Boston, which I guess is a plus).
And as much as people tend to lump Emerson and Thoreau together (they were friends, after all), it always apalls me. Thoreau is twenty times the thinker and writer that Emerson is.
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