Yellowstone

It's been almost three years since I've pre-blogged about a destination. I figure it's about time for one of those posts in advance of next month's travel plans.

In 2011, I spent two weeks with my friends Mike and Bryan driving across the United States from my home in Arlington, Virginia all the way to Portland, Oregon. It was the first time I'd ever driven across the entire continent and it's a kind of trip that I won't likely ever make again. 

I actually probably shouldn't make statements like that. If there's one thing that 2020 has taught me, it's that things I never expected to happen will happen whether I like it or not. So yeah...never say never or even won't likely ever.

One of the highlights of that long distance drive was a two night stop at Yellowstone National Park. We arrived there in the afternoon from the east after traveling 12 plus hours from Deadwood, South Dakota, and left maybe about 40 hours later to the west en route to Seattle. With so far to go in just two weeks, there just wasn't much time to linger, but we did think it was important to get in a whole day in the Park. That meant two nights.

In our one full day there, we set out first thing in the morning from our hotel in Lake Village and headed north and counter-clockwise around the Great Loop, hitting the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Tower-Roosevelt area and Mammoth Hot Springs, before heading south to Old Faithful and then back around to the hotel. If there's one thing to be said about our time in Yellowstone, it's that we didn't run out of sights to see. 

The main reason we didn't run out of stuff to do in a single day is Yellowstone National Park is massive. At almost 3,500 square miles, it's bigger than the entire state of Delaware by about 40% and it's more than twice the size of Rhode Island. Maybe you don't think of Rhode Island and Delaware as being big but we're comparing the size of an entire state to the size of a single National Park. This place is big. Too big, in fact, to cover in a single day. One day I figured I'd have to go back and do it right.

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

2020 has been littered with cancelled trips. Costa Rica in March. New Mexico in May. California in June. Maine in July and (again) in August. England later in August. And most recently we made the decision to give up on a trip to Rwanda, Uganda and Zanzibar in October. That last one hurt, but there was really no other option.

It hasn't all been doom and gloom this year. We have both been healthy all year long and we've been able to transform some of those cancelled trips into reasonable facsimiles of the original intent. A national parks trip to California got morphed into a national parks trip in Utah and Colorado. Maine got replaced with Vermont, although Maine was really a substitute for Costa Rica so Vermont didn't stand a chance of coming close to the original deal there. New Mexico and England? Well...some other time maybe.

But when it came time to think about if we should even try to replace a trip where we'd be trekking into the mountains to see gorillas in the wild, driving around Queen Elizabeth National Park on safari and walking through the jungles of Zanzibar looking for monkeys, we were a little lost. We thought about a trip up to Churchill, Manitoba to see polar bears but the fact that Canada is not admitting Americans to their country right now killed that one pretty quickly. Ultimately, we decided if we were going to replace an animal watching trip with something similar that had to be in the United States, we should head out to a place where we could see the greatest collection of wild wildlife in our country. And that meant just one place: Yellowstone. Looks like that return trip I thought about in 2011 is happening this year.

This time we are doing it right. No 40 hours in the Park this year. We are dedicating three whole days plus whatever time we can squeeze in from a fourth day driving up through Grand Teton National Park starting early in the morning. We'll be hitting parts of the Park like the North and South Entrances, but most especially the Lamar Valley, that I didn't get a chance to visit in 2011. I have to say I'm pretty excited about that last part.

When I visited Yellowstone in 2011, my greatest hope was that I'd see a bison. Just one would have been enough. At that time I knew precious little about the Park, including that seeing a bison was pretty much a sure thing. We saw one strolling down the middle of the road in front of our car within the first half hour we were in the park. After that, we saw them everywhere. Our car was even surrounded by them on the way out of the west entrance. I need not have worried about seeing a bison. 

I was incredibly casual about looking for animals back then. I didn't make a deliberate effort to find the spots with the greatest concentration of wildlife or go out looking at dawn or dusk when I now know the chances of spotting creatures is the greatest. We just roamed at a time that was convenient for us. And honestly, while we saw a grizzly bear and tons of bison, we really didn't see much else. There are supposedly more elk in the park than any other mammal species and we saw one. And at a great distance at that. I'd forgotten we spotted a coyote until I looked through my pictures from that trip while writing this post. The 2011 trip to Yellowstone was all about that one grizzly and the many, many bison.

This year will be way different. I'm certain. Or at least I'm hoping since I'm way, way more prepared. There's no way we aren't seeing much, much more wildlife this time around. 

2011 in Yellowstone: grizzly bear, elk and coyote. And a whole lot of landscape.

Wildlife wasn't the only reason I put Yellowstone on our 2011 westward journey. I also went for the scenery and for the volcanic action, including a stop to watch Old Faithful geyser erupt surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of other people. Here again, we just scratched the surface nine years ago. I was impressed by the colors and landscape at our stop at Mammoth Hot Springs and the Rockies are amazing. But in the last month I found out we missed as many impressive spots as we saw, if not more, including Grand Prismatic Spring. No way are we missing that this year, not even if its guarded by a few grizzlies and a pack or two of wolves. 

I might chalk the animals and the geysers and hot pools we missed up to a mistake or two. But honestly, we didn't have any time to spare in our one day anyway. Three whole days seems much more sensible. 

2011 is a long time ago. I've changed so much in the way I travel since nine years ago, from the knowledge I carry with me, to my travel habits, to the technology that I've embraced. I've gathered together the most spectacular photographs from nine plus years ago that I could for this post and I'm not thrilled. My photos of animals likely stretched the capabilities of my Blackberry to the max and my landscapes aren't much better. I even managed to cut the top of Old Faithful off with my beginner camera skills. 

There were also fewer than about 30 total pictures to choose from. If there's one definite improvement I've made in my picture-taking habits, it's to take pictures in bunches. If I come back from this trip with fewer than 500 pics of Yellowstone I'll be surprised.

I'm lucky to be able to have a second shot at Yellowstone, even as I continue to whine about being (mostly) confined to the United States. I get that our country's government has badly bungled the response to this global pandemic and by the time it's all over or close to it, I'll have abandoned international travel for 12 months or probably more. Yellowstone won't be Rwanda, Uganda and Zanzibar but it will likely still be an incredible natural showcase. I'm excited to see it again and for a lot longer and in a different season. And not just for the wildlife. I know we missed some incredible sights or made short stops at others in 2011 which are now on my list for this year.

Yellowstone in an American icon. And I think it's going to be spectacular the second time around.

Green Mountains

If there's one place I never would have imagined myself going on vacation, it would have been anywhere in New England. With all apologies to everyone I knew or know up there, I have to confess I supremely disliked growing up there as a new immigrant from the original England. I'm still bothered by it today even though I know I should let it go already.

Maybe I got unlucky hitting the educational system starting in the 6th grade but the fixation in history classes on the American Revolutionary War and the British (i.e. me) being the enemy made me feel unwelcome. Teachers telling our class lies like the British still refer to the United States as "the colonies" and that people in the United Kingdom in the 1970s still feel the sting of the loss of a war 200 years prior didn't make it any better. And I do get that should let it go. Really, I do.

Given all that history, I was a little surprised with myself when I pencilled in a summer trip to Maine with some funds that United Airlines refused to return to me when I cancelled a March vacation down to Costa Rica.I guess I somehow allowed an exception for Maine in my blackballing of New England and this global pandemic has everything turned upside down anyway.

We never made it to Maine. Ultimately, we decided their entrance policy for tourists being dependent on a quick-turnaround, reliable negative virus test was too risky. But the slippery slope I had put us on by thinking about New England as a fun place to go made us decide to look just two states west to Vermont. By the time I knew what I had done, I found myself on a Wednesday night in Vermont eating some of the best English style fish and chips with mushy peas I've ever had in this country. Oh, the irony.

Paper Mill Village Bridge, Bennington.

In our almost four days in the Green Mountain State, we covered from the very southwest corner of Vermont all the way up to the very northeast corner of the state. We spent a ton of time driving on this trip and I'm still not sure how we ended up with all the time inside our Jeep Renegade. I mean, the state's not really that big, is it? There are lots of roads, I guess.

We sneaked into the state from upstate New York and stayed in Bennington for the first night before winding our way north to Burlington, completing our maple syrup pilgrimage (HAD to!) and starting our tour of Vermont breweries along the way. We used Burlington as a base for exploring the upper half of the state. And when I say exploring, I really mean driving around looking at a lot of nature. Although not quite so much as we hoped.

Our idea behind Bennington was to use it as a way stop, a town to spend a night along the way to break up the journey and we did something here we rarely, if ever, do: just showed up and started looking for stuff to see. I don't want to categorize our time in Bennington as completely spontaneous, but it was as close as we likely will ever come to that.

So what did we do in Vermont after checking in? Literally the first thing that popped into my head was "covered bridges". Bennington has three. Or more accurately, Bennington has three within like three miles of our hotel. Seriously, we saw I think two others in the rest of our almost four days in the state after checking out three of them in the first hour we were there.

The Bennington Battle Monument, as seen from the ground.

I remember visiting covered bridges (probably in Vermont) as a kid and hating them. What's the big deal? It's just a wooden tunnel that spans a river. And maybe hate's the wrong word but that's what I'd probably have said back then. I'd rather have been playing Pac-Man, I'm sure. 

But as a work of engineering (now that I'm an adult of sorts), even as over designed as some of these things are I'm sure, there is an elegance and usefulness in building a box truss that takes advantage of the structure's height and width to create a one lane tunnel (and most all of them are one way) to drive a horse and cart or automobile over a river or creek. We saw three. We drove over all three.

We also found the Bennington Battle Monument, which according to their own website is the state's most popular historic site. And yes, it was erected (albeit more than 100 years after the fact) to celebrate a victory over the British during the American Revolutionary War. There are a couple of statues of minutemen or whatever they are nearby the Monument. I'm electing to just post a picture of the masonry structure against the blue sky backdrop when we were there rather than including statues. Probably because I'm bitter. Or something. There's some fake resentment going on in this post but there's an undercurrent that's real. Let's move on to something else. I know...I need to get over this.

Besides a sort of spontaneous stop in Bennington, a visit to a maple syrup farm and a half a dozen brewery drive-bys, there were a couple of other priorities we had for our Vermont trip. But before we get to those, I have to say I think we were both so impressed by the beauty of Vermont itself. I mean we knew it was the Green Mountain State and that its very name was derived from the French for green (vert) and mountains (monts) but the whole place is literally mountains (if you allow that mountains can be less than 4,500 feet above sea level) that are covered in trees. We've taken a couple of gorgeous drives earlier this year (both out in Colorado) and driving though Vermont approached both of those in terms of impressive-ness. I have to say I didn't really expect to get that out of a long weekend in New England.

So about those couple of other things. First, I had to set foot on the Long Trail. And second, I needed to see a moose. A lot of control over the first one but not a whole lot of control over the other.

The Long Trail is basically a really long hiking trail. It was constructed by the Green Mountain Club from 1910 to 1930 and runs the entire length of Vermont's mountain range. Walk the whole thing and you'll be on it for 273 miles all the way from the Massachusetts state line to the border between the United States and Canada. At about 14 miles each day, that would take about 20 days. Don't worry, there are sleeping cabins along the way if you are interested. Just make arrangements to pick up food every now and then.

If you are thinking that the Long Trail sounds just like the more famous Appalachian Trail only smaller, you'd be correct. The Long Trail was the inspiration for the Appalachian Trail. The Long Trail is the oldest long distance hiking trail in the United States. It's the original.

Look for the white marks on the trees to stay on the Long Trail's path.

Now clearly on a long weekend in Vermont, I wasn't going to get very far on the Long Trail. And with breweries, maple syrup, moose, at least two stops at Ben & Jerry's and all sorts of other things on the agenda (not to mention there's no way I'm sleeping in a hut on a trail) we didn't really have much time at all to spend on the Long Trail at all. But I did think this trail was historic enough that I at least wanted to say I'd set foot on it.

So after our first night in Burlington (and actually on the way to the Ben & Jerry's factory if you must know...) we headed out to Camel's Hump State Park where we knew we would find a trailhead that would take us directly onto the Long Trail.

I'd read before our visit how difficult this trail was to walk. I had read that it was steep and slow going and that there was no point wearing waterproof footwear because the water in spots would be so deep that it wouldn't matter. And that you WOULD get wet. Soaked even. I'd read that you would likely be walking in spots through forest so thick that in some places you would lose the trail and be completely reliant on the white markings on the trees to find your way, assuming someone actually painted the markings recently. 

We didn't get any of that, likely because we spent all of about an hour on the Trail itself. And by an hour I mean like 25 minutes in and 25 minutes out. Hey, we had other stuff going on. But I can see that walking 273 miles through the wooded mountains of Vermont would be no small task, and I don't mean to be just simply stating the obvious there. The day we were out there was thick, like hot and humid, and every step it seemed involved walking over a bunch of tree roots or some rocks or boulders or something in our way.  We could have walked a lot more than we did (just reference last year's walk to Machu Picchu if there's any doubt there) but I definitely wouldn't want to spend days out there on this trail.

Very large rock on the Long Trail. 

And then there was the whole moose foolishness thing.

Inherently, I knew our quest for moose was going to be a losing battle. I've been wildlife watching enough either here at home in the United States or elsewhere in the world to know that the best time to look for animals is in the morning or just before dark. I've also barely avoided too many times to count and actually hit (twice, if you must know) deer with my car in upstate New York on my way to or from work during the late '90s to have the concept that dawn and dusk are active times for creatures (particularly deer, of which moose are the largest) adequately drilled into my head. We didn't go moose spotting first thing in the morning or at the end of the day.

Maybe I should clarify that. We did get up early and probably left Burlington by about 6:30. But to get to our moose spots, it took about 2-1/2 hours (again...how big is this super small state?) so by the time we got there, it was not anywhere close to dawn.

I thought we had a great list: the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge; two stretches of sometimes moose-filled highway along the way; a moose watching platform; and a 5 mile section of road (admittedly in New Hampshire) nicknamed Moose Alley. How can you not find moose on a road named Moose Alley? We managed it, although we did see a bear.

Good advice. But un-needed for us. Along Moose Alley in New Hampshire.

I'd say all told we were on the road on our moose day for about 11 plus hours. And it was all driving, except for a quick stop for lunch and of course a quick brewery visit. Most of this time was spent getting across and back the fat part of the state of Vermont. 

Most of our looking time was spent at the Conte Fish and Wildlife Refuge, a maze of dirt and gravel trails that are almost consistently really just one car wide and surprisingly steep in spots. Good thing we brought the Jeep on this trip.

We roamed around the Refuge for hours, initially heading for Lewis Pond before going further into the woods to the Lewis Pond Overlook and then backtracking and hitting the Molly Beattie Bog. We figured a pond and a bog would be great locations for moose sighting and if we didn't see any up close at the pond then an overlook would get us a great view of all the moose in the entire pond area. 

They weren't. We couldn't see any more than like four feet in front of our face at the Bog (vegetation...) and Lewis Pond isn't visible at all from Lewis Pond Overlook (ironically; lots of irony in this post). 

The Pond itself is a gorgeous, still, lake-sized body of water surrounded by mountains and trees (just like the rest of the state) and while we stood on the beach looking out over the water, we saw something white on the move which looked like a large animal with some sort of fan-like assembly popping up out of the Pond every so often. Had to be a moose and the zoom lens on the camera seemed to confirm it. At least we'd go home with one confirmed sighting.

Lewis Pond, Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge. 

My wife doubted. She kept asking why the moose was white. It was an excellent question. And albino moose was not a good answer. Ultimately when we got a chance to check out the moose on a larger screen than the tiny view on our camera, the "moose" turned out to be a loon, a large goose-like bird with distinct black and white coloring. The fan like assemblage I assumed was a set of antlers obviously was the bird spreading its wings. Darn it!

No moose in the refuge. No moose near the moose watching platform, which was really just a ramp and a hut near the side of the highway. No moose at Moose Alley. If it wasn't for the gorgeous scenery, this day would have been a complete waste. Here's hoping the next time I go looking for moose will be a lot more successful. Back to Burlington to watch the sun set over Lake Champlain and a little Vermont beer.

Lake Champlain. Sunset.

I guess Vermont turned out to be OK for a long weekend. I'd even consider going back if I were on my way somewhere else or I was just in the neighborhood. If nothing else, I'd love to load up the car with some of that good Vermont beer. And maybe a little of the right kind of maple syrup.

So does this cure my reluctance to travel to New England ever again? Probably not, but in researching our postponed and then cancelled trip to Maine I'm convinced I need to get up there next summer for a long weekend. A little puffin watching and a lot of lobster roll eating I'm thinking. And if we time it right, maybe a trip into the bogs to try to find some moose. Only this time at dawn or dusk and maybe with a moose guide. I hear Maine is way better for moose than Vermont.

If you had told me at the beginning of this year I'd spend a long weekend in Vermont and love it, I would have thought you were crazy, or something was seriously wrong with this world, which is about right. But this was a good summer break, despite the lack of very large deer we spotted. The Long Trail was a must have touchstone moment and we learned a ton about maple syrup. We also had a lot of really good food and managed three meals seated at restaurants outside. In 2020, it's the small things that matter. I'll treasure our time in Vermont, even though it's probably way down on the list of places to go back to. But it's not last. 

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How We Did It

We visited three covered bridges just west of downtown Bennington. We drove over the Henry Covered Bridge, the Paper Mill Village Bridge and the Silk Road Covered Bridge in less than 30 minutes. There are parking areas near all three. Just beware oncoming traffic if you decide to go walking into one or more of the bridges. 

The Bennington Battle Monument is easy to find. It is possible to climb the monument. It's open every day from May through October according to their website. We just took a quick walk around and didn't opt for the guided tour. We had fish and chips on our mind after all.

Speaking of fish and chips, if you are looking for some good grub while in Bennington, I highly recommend Lil' Britain at 116 North Street. Look them up on Facebook. There was no dine in option when we went there but their food traveled the couple of miles to our hotel pretty well, including (remarkably) the chips. Get the mushy peas. And ask for some malt vinegar. 

Camel's Hump State Park is in Duxbury, Vermont, an easy 45 minute drive from Burlington. If you use Google Maps, the directions will take you to the main parking lot. The trailhead for the Long Trail is located off River Road near the Winooski River before you make the right turn into the parking lot. 

The Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge is all the way on the east side of the state in Brunswick. We spent hours here and honestly, I can see it being a great place to see wildlife, just not in the middle of the day when we were there. If you plan to make it any distance into the Refuge, make sure you allot a ton of time or drive fast (I recommend the former). Make sure you have plenty of gas and a four wheel drive or high clearance vehicle. And if you think you are going to be OK ignoring the "No Outlet" sign when you head east from Molly Beattie Bog as the quickest way out back to the highway...don't! Turn around and go back the way you came in. Trust me.

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Have Another Beer

2020 was a year I was supposed to expand my wine drinking experience. We loved our 2018 Napa Valley trip so much that we decided to make a follow up visit just two short years later. I was excited. I had all the vineyards picked out and was ready to get out there to northern California and taste some amazing new (to me) wines. Combine that with some of the Valley's incredible food and it pretty much sounded like heaven. 

Fate, I guess, had other ideas. 

The outbreak of a global pandemic, working full time from home and all sorts of travel restrictions globally and domestically caused us to swap out that Napa trip for a week in the Utah desert. We just couldn't get our heads wrapped around getting on a plane headed all the way across this country of ours. My 2020 wine dream was dead. Some other time, maybe.

Sometimes, fate has a way of making things up to you. Instead of a few days exploring wine in California in June, I got a long weekend tracking down as much beer as I could handle in Vermont in August. Who'd have thought? Certainly not me. And I'm not complaining.

The last time I was on any sort of beer pilgrimage, it was in Portland, Oregon in 2018, right after I spent those few days in Napa I referenced a couple of paragraphs ago. We visited six of the approximately 60 breweries in that city in three days or so that got us some amazing beer drinking experiences. Now we'd have to do the same thing in Vermont, a state that has approximately the same number of breweries as Portland just spread out over an area about 66 times the size. During a pandemic. I like to think that I can embrace the challenges life lays out for me. I was up for this!

Vermont's beer history is perhaps not so significant to the history of American brewing as the city of Portland but that doesn't mean that this experience needed to be any less awesome than our time in Oregon two years ago. But because of the area we were dealing with here, I'd have to be a little more selective. Research would be required.

I started with the Vermont Brewers Association webpage, which contains links for about 60 breweries and brewpubs in the state. I then checked the website of every single brewery and read all about every one of their beers to get a sense of where I wanted to go to drink what I wanted to drink. That got me down to a list of 10 or 11 breweries that had the kinds of beer I would be interested in. A lot of them happened to be clustered around Burlington. 

Looks like we'd be staying in Burlington.

Fresh hops. Baird Farm, North Chittendon, VT.

My pre-trip research into Vermont's breweries identified some trends: lots of saisons (a simple, refreshing country-style beer); breweries that freely mixed the English, Belgian and German brewing traditions; plenty of fruit sours; the odd beer made with maple syrup; and a lot of different beers per brewery. This last point proved tricky because between the time I settled on what I wanted to go try while researching in July, the beers were frequently unavailable in mid-August. That meant heading to certain breweries with my heart set on specific beers only to find that what I wanted wasn't available any more. 

Now, ordinarily on a beer pilgrimage, I'd spend a good amount of time in bars or brewery tasting rooms sampling multiple different kinds of beer and talking with the folks working there about their product. This 2020 global pandemic forced me to alter that strategy and take beer to go. That meant plenty of cans, bottles and just a few growlers. Don't ever accuse me of not being adaptable.

I'll also point out that ordinary beer posts on this blog often feature photographs of gorgeous-looking glasses full of delicious beer in situ at whatever bar, pub or brewery we happened to be supping said beers. No such pics this time around. Instead, I've had to make do with images of (largely) empty taprooms supplemented with a couple of pictures of the actual brews taken in hotel rooms or right here at home. That means there are fewer pictures of beer than usual; there was no way around this, but I thought it was important to show some pictures of actual beer on this post. 

We ended up hitting six breweries in our (almost) four days in the Green Mountain State. Here's what I liked and what I didn't like, in no particular order.

Little Umbrellas beer, disposable cup, Best Western Bennington. Classy, right?

What I liked: Four Quarters Brewing

To kick things off, Four Quarters is officially my new favorite brewery.

Of all the Vermont beers that I tried on this trip, Four Quarters' beers were consistently the best. Now admittedly this is based on a super small sample size since I only tasted three of their beers but three out of three ain't bad. Or maybe it's like 2-3/4 out of three (we'll get to that soon). In addition to being consistently good across the board, the best two beers of this trip (in my opinion) were Little Umbrellas and Great Bear, and they were both brewed by Four Quarters. 

Great Bear is a brown ale whose label lists the terms "lightly smoked", "chocolate" and "oatmeal" which I assume is either the process of treating the ingredients used in the beer or the ingredients themselves. This is the smoothest, creamiest, most flavorful brown ale I think I have ever had in my life. Think about drinking a chocolate oatmeal cookie and you'll be pretty much spot on here. Amazingly sweet and delicious. I took notes on all the Vermont beers I tried. I wrote "Wow!" when I tasted Great Bear. This would be an awesome dessert beer. And yes, there is such a thing.

We picked up Great Bear at the brewery itself in Winooski, VT. We found Little Umbrellas at the Bennington Beverage Outlet, and already knowing the brewery was out of this particular beer, picked up the last four pack at that store. It's almost difficult for me to discuss Little Umbrellas, brewed with lactose, pineapple and toasted coconut, as a beer. It was more pineapple juice than beer on the initial taste but it was super refreshing, especially with a low 3.5% ABV level. This is likely the oddest beer I have ever loved. I've had beer with pineapple before but nothing so forward or complex as this. I'd have this anytime. It would be a great breakfast beer (yes, there is such a thing) or a nice starter to an afternoon of some sampling.

If I ever make it back to Burlington, I'm heading to Four Quarters for a few hours and sitting outside at one of their barrel tables and going through as much of their tap list as I can. Great can design too!

Empty bar pic number one: the bar at Rock Art Brewing.

What I Didn't Like: Gruit

One of the riskiest beers I bought on this trip was an ancient type of beer called gruit brewed by Rock Art Brewery in Morrisville, VT. Gruit was apparently brewed in the area of Europe where Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands come together today in a time when the use of hops as a flavoring for beer was not widespread. There's something about non-modern beer that fascinates me (see my banana beer post from Tanzania) so I figured it was worth splurging for a four pack of this stuff.

Rock Art's version of gruit is flavored with lavender, rose-hips, elderberry and chamomile and after one can the word that comes to mind most immediately after tasting this stuff is "medicinal". And that's not a good word to spring to mind when drinking beer. The yeast from the can floating around in the glass (it never settled for some reason) didn't make the drink any more appealing. I have three more cans of this beer at home. Anyone want to come over for some gruit?

What I Liked: Vermont Maple Wheat

Since I've just labeled one of Rock Art's beers as "medicinal", I thought I ought to make it up to them right away. Not that I'm looking to hand out praise that isn't deserved. This is.

One of my Vermont beer resolutions was to try at least one beer made with maple syrup. I absolutely had to do this, even though I expected that the taste of maple syrup mixed with beer would likely be an unpleasant experience. Not gruit unpleasant, but probably overly sweet and sickly unpleasant.

It wasn't. Not in Rock Art's Vermont Maple Wheat at least. This beer was actually one of the top probably four or five beers I had on this trip. Maple Wheat is a thick, dark colored beer which looks like cider (think cider mill cider, not fermented cider). It's a sweet, well carbonated beer that doesn't taste like maple syrup at all, although you can definitely get some burnt dark maple syrup which adds to the complexity. This wasn't the only beer brewed with maple syrup we picked up in Vermont, but it was the best.

This was a pleasant surprise. I have as many cans of this left as I do of Gruit. Maybe I can drown out the taste of the Gruit with the Maple Wheat? Assuming nobody's coming over to drink the gruit.

The outdoor patio at Four Quarters. Best Vermont saison based on our small sample size.

What I Liked (but not as much as I'd hoped): The Saisons

I love saison beer. It was initially brewed as a low-alcohol content, thirst quenching beer to be drunk after a day of hard work tending the fields in summer. Fortunately, this style of beer is available to those who haven't worked a day in the fields in their lives. In terms of August in Vermont, saisons (or grisettes, which are essentially a cousin of the saison) were available at five of the six breweries we visited. We picked up some at four of those five.

The saisons we bought up in Vermont were a mixed bag. Four Quarters' Fleur de Lis was light with a tart finish and almost exactly what I wanted in a saison, albeit I would ideally have liked a little more flavor. Good Measure's Tread Lightly (brewed with strawberries and rhubarb) was good but oddly not carbonated. I still have a second bottle of this in my cellar so there's a second chance to see if this beer is actually carbonated.

But overall I didn't get what i wanted of the saisons. I thought Queen City's Barrel-Aged Saison - Brett "C" fell flat and Rock Art's Black Currant Saison was barely recognizable as blackcurrant flavored in addition to being a little bitter on the back end, which I don't associate with a saison.

Well done again, Four Quarters. Not crazy about the rest.

What I Liked: The Green State Lager Can Design

We picked up just a single type of beer at Zero Gravity Brewing and that was a 12 pack of their Green State Lager. And yes, I bought it for the can design. Sort of. 

From a graphic design standpoint, the 1950s was probably the apex (for me) of graphic design in the United States, and any sort of product design that harkens back to that decade is an instant success. Beer cans are no exception. Green State Lager has full on 1950s going on in my book.

I love the gold and green (for Vermont) on the matte white can. I love the script "Green State" and the retro maple leaf. I love the clean-ness and verticality of the whole logo with the brewery name and mascot (the hummingbird) worked into the overall composition. This could absolutely be a product design I could see being on the refrigerator shelves some 70 or so years ago.

So I didn't deliberately limit myself to one beer at Zero Gravity and I didn't ONLY buy it for the can design. I would likely have bought more but Zero Gravity suffered from me wanting too many of their out of season beers (and too few of their in season beers). And I did want one American pilsner on this trip. Box checked!

I did, though, buy their Green State glass for the label. It was the only glass I bought on this trip. So they have that going for them.

Empty bar pic number two: Queen City. My order is on the bar.

What I Didn't Like: Taking Beer To Go

Honestly, this sucked!

When I go to a brewery or brewpub, I want to sit down in the drinking space created by the brewer and taste some beer. I don't want it to go in cans, bottles or even growlers. I want small tasters, I want full pints that I can sip and get more if I want or switch it up when I'm not enthralled by what I ordered the first time. I want to relax. I want to hold the beer glass in my hand and drink deeply and lovingly from it. I want to eat brewpub food or food truck food if that's what they do. I want to sit and enjoy. I want the place to improve my drinking experience.

Drinking in a hotel room or drinking at home after vacation...not the same. Not at all.

Now, truth be told, I could have drank in some brewery tap rooms maxed out at 25% capacity. But stopping and drinking beer outside at Zero Gravity or Four Quarters or Queen City or Rock Art seemed to be tempting fate virus-wise and sitting inside at Queen City was a complete no go. If I had stayed somewhere based on our quick stops at six breweries, it would have been at Queen City. I would have had glasses of Yorkshire Porter and Landlady ESB and more than the taster of Steinbier that I asked for when I picked up the six pack, two bottles and growler to go. Stupid pandemic!

By the way, the ESB was legit. I would have loved to have some Landlady from a cask. And the Steinbier (made with hot rocks in the parking lot apparently) deserved more than a taster.

Good Measure Brewing, Northfield, VT.

What I Liked: BLCK Vol. 15

It is rare that I find an English style mild outside of the United Kingdom. Travel to Northfield, VT and you'll find a good one at Good Measure Brewing right in their downtown space.

For me, a good English mild has to have a low level of carbonation (assuming it's not hand pumped out of a cask) and needs to have that tea-like taste that you find in good English pub beer. Good Measure has made sure the carbonation level is reasonably low and has guaranteed the tea taste is there by brewing the beer with actual tea. Now, sure, that sort of strategy is not totally traditional but the gamble totally works for me. 

And then Good Measure one-upped their inspiration. Milds don't typically carry a ton of flavor but this version totally did. Good dark roasted malt along with the tea improved on the original. Something different. Good beer. I'd put it right behind (and totally different from) the two from Four Quarters. 

What I Liked (although my research is incomplete): Burlington Beer Company's Fruits

So I'm not a huge fan of fruit beers. At the same time, I think there's a time and place where fruit beers belong. 

Our visit to Burlington Beer Company represented for me the biggest risk in terms of what we'd pick up to go. Part of this was their pretty much totally inscrutable beer names (how do I understand what Seances and Sacrifices is as a beer?) but another was the heavy reliance on fruit in the beers I selected.

I walked away from BBCo with four packs of Strawberry Whale Cake, Double Roadside Bandits (somehow a beer made with blueberry pancakes and some other stuff) and a key lime and kumquat You Can't Get There From Here (or YCGTFH, which sounds like some kind of H.P. Lovecraft monster). And yes, there are other flavors of Whale Cake and YCGTFH. And yes, I also made off with a four pack of Seances and Sacrifices, which turned out to be an imperial stout made with maple syrup and a 12% ABV level and $32 four pack price!

I was impressed by the Whale Cake and Double Roadside Bandits. You could taste legit fresh fruit flavor in both, although I'd probably give the nod to the Whale Cake because of the incredibly bitter yeast sediment in the Bandits. But the YCGTFH was like juice with a sour kick at the end. It was really pretty awesome and yes, let's face it, another breakfast beer.

If anyone living remotely near me is headed to Vermont any time soon, please get me the rest of the YCGTFH series of beers. Please! I'll pay handsomely. I need more of this stuff. Strictly for research, of course.

Empty bar pic number three: Zero Gravity. The people in this pic work there.

It is way more difficult to taste a lot of different beers from breweries during a pandemic. I mean it's just not possible to take one can of each beer to go. They sort of come in four packs or six packs. This was a real problem when we went to Utah and Colorado earlier in the summer. Buy a six pack of beer...you have to drink the whole thing before you move on to something else. It's not like you can bring it home with you on the plane. And God knows, I'm not leaving beer behind. Well...maybe the Gruit.

Fortunately for me, we drove to Vermont. That meant I didn't have to consume all the beers I bought up there in the Green Mountain state before we came home. We just loaded up the trunk with the excess beer and brought it on home. 56 cans and six bottles, if you are counting (I was).

Not only does this reduce the beer drinking stress level (yes, that's such a thing) but I also get to re-live one portion of our vacation every week for the next few weeks. Bonus!

We found some good stuff up in Vermont. I'm going to be sad when it's all gone. Going to have to stretch out some of this, although let's face it, there's no way I'm going to have any left by the end of October.

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How We Did It

We visited six breweries in Vermont in less than four days in state. Click on the brewery names in the information below to link to each brewery's website. I'm not posting hours for any of the six. This pandemic's probably got the hours all messed up and the best way to check current opening hours is by going to the source.

We visited Good Measure Brewing on our way from Bennington to Burlington. It's not exactly on the way but it's not a huge detour either. Was it worth tacking on 30 or 40 minutes on to our journey to bring home a four pack of BLCK Vol. 15? I think so. I'd do it again. We also picked up the Early Riser Cream Ale (get it!), the East Street Bitter (too much burnt caramel for me) and the Tread Lightly grisette referenced earlier in this post. The jury's still out on that one. If the second bottle I bought is carbonated, the rating on that beer has to go up.

Completing a pickup run to Four Quarters, Burlington Beer Company, Queen City and Zero Gravity took us less than an hour once our orders were placed in advance. There are probably other brewers that could be added or substituted in a similar time frame. I think all are worthwhile visiting. I'd go for the Yorkshire Porter, Landlady ESB and whatever else takes your fancy at Queen City; I'd stay all day at Four Quarters if the early returns are any indication; and I'd definitely want to spend time exploring at Zero Gravity and Burlington Beer Company.

If you are staying in Burlington or coming west from the eastern part of Vermont, it's a long ride to Rock Art Brewery in Morrisville. If I had to make that trip knowing what I know now, would I? Probably not, but that Vermont Maple Wheat is some seriously good beer. I'd definitely look for a four pack (or two) in a beer store if I'm ever in Vermont again.

Finally, I started looking at breweries in Vermont by visiting the Vermont Brewers Association website. I know it probably doesn't include every brewery in Vermont but it served me well as a starting point.

Finally finally, don't put too much stock in what I've written in this post. I believe I'm a knowledgable and serious beer drinker but I like what I like and that's not what everyone likes. Ultimately, we all need to drink beer that we like and not what someone else likes. If you make beer pilgrimage to Vermont, I hope you love what you find, even if it's not what I like. Clear enough? Good!

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Post-Original Blog Post Note (from 2021): I wrote this blog post about a month after our trip to Vermont. At that time, I had started going through the beers we brought back. Sometimes, beers endear themselves to you over time in ways that aren't apparent on the first tasting. Conversely, some beers become less appealing on repeated drinkings. After consuming my entire stash that I brought back, I most enjoyed Four Quarters' Little Umbrellas and Great Bear and Zero Gravity's Green State Lager. These beers were honestly legitimately awesome. On the flip side, I became less enthusiastic about Rock Art's and Burlington Beer Company's beers, particularly the Gruit (which I actually threw away) and the Double Roadside Bandits (which had so much yeast in it as to become unpleasant). I've left the original text of this post intact, but have elected to add this supplemental note. I crave Little Umbrellas and Green State regularly. Seriously amazing beer.

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Drive-In Saturday

I don't know if it's the fact that I'm an immigrant to this country, but I have a general love affair with Americana, particularly...let's say the period of the 1950s to the 1970s. My house is full of mid-century modern furniture and clocks; I love pop art and comic books; I'm a sucker for neon; one day I would love to own a classic car with tail fins; and although I've generally abandoned it, I would eat American fast food every day if I thought it was good for me. I could keep going but I won't. I crave all-American experiences tied to a certain period of American history. That's all there is to say there.

Except it isn't. Because when I reached my 52nd birthday a couple of months ago, I'd never been to a drive-in movie, which I consider a touchstone experience to that period of American history. That changed last month in Vermont.

It seems like credit for creation of the first drive-in movie theater is generally given to Richard Hollingshead, who opened the Automobile Movie Theater in Camden, New Jersey in June of 1933. While it seems like the idea (and even the practice) of watching a film outdoors while sitting in a car had been around before then, Hollingshead was perhaps the first one to turn that idea into a bonafide business concern. Or maybe he just gets all the credit because he patented the idea. Whatever the reason, he's generally seen as the inventor of the concept.

Hollingshead's idea didn't catch fire right away, maybe because of the patent and the royalties that would be due Hollingshead for copying his idea. Shankweiler's became the second ever drive-in theater when it opened the very next year in nearby Orefield, PA, and by the 1940s there were some more scattered across the country here and there, but it seems like maybe fewer than 50 or 100 total. 

Shankweiler's, by the way, is still in business today some 87 years later, making it the oldest of its kind.

The golden age of the drive-in theater arrived in the 1950s, when the economic boom following the end of World War II put a car in every American family's driveway and the country found new ways to spend time in Detroit's finest machines. New roads and personal automobiles connected people to destinations they couldn't have imagined visiting before the '50s. Drive-in restaurants popped up so that families didn't even need to leave their car while eating and the drive-in theater was poised to take off, especially after Hollingshead's patent was ruled invalid early in the same decade. By 1958, there were more than 4,000 of them in the United States.

Sunset Drive-In screen 2. Waiting for the light to disappear...

But the drive-in movie theater came with inherent business limitations. You can't show movies all year round because it's too cold to have folks sitting in their cars in the middle of fields most places in the winter. You also can't really show movies very well in the rain, so showings are sometime subject to last minute cancellations. Oh, and there's that whole light thing. Projecting a movie indoors in the middle of the afternoon or even late morning works just fine; just turn out the lights. Not so much when you are watching outdoors. It needs to be dark first which limits you to pretty much one screen time or maybe two per night. Not a whole lot of money in one showing a night, particularly if you only have one screen.

If you could make a go of all that in the 1950s, pretty soon there were other economic pressures on the drive-in theater owner. The drive-in movie theater experience is made for the kind of automobiles manufactured in the post-WWII boom: wide sedans with comfy bench seats stretching across the entire width of the car, sometimes with convertible tops that when down completed the nighttime viewing experience just perfectly. Then in the 1970s we had a little fuel crisis in this country. Goodbye large spacious gas-guzzling cars; hello compact fuel-efficient hatchbacks. It's not so comfortable sitting in a small car with bucket seats for a couple of hours watching a movie. Or doing whatever else you might be prone to do in a parked car at night under the stars.

Two other things happened in the 1960s and 1970s that further sounded the death knell for drive-ins. First, people started moving out of urban areas and into suburban areas where drive-in theaters were located. That wide open tract of land built to hold nothing more than a parking lot for nighttime use now became a lot more valuable, and holding onto that property now worth way more all of a sudden became too much for some theater owners to resist selling. And then the VCR was invented and became affordable. Why pay for a night out at a drive-in when you could do it a lot cheaper in front of your own TV?

The 4,000 plus drive-in theaters in 1958 have been reduced to about 400 today. They likely are mostly labors of love at this point for their owners. Fortunately for this Americana-loving immigrant, one of the 400 or so is in Colchester, Vermont which was about a 10 minute drive from where we were staying in downtown Burlington. Movie time!!

Screen 1. Getting closer to showtime.

Colchester's Sunset Drive-In was opened in 1948 and it's been owned by the same family since it opened in that year.  It's a legit throwback. This place is the real deal. For 32 years, the Sunset operated with just a single screen. Then in 1980 they added two more and a fourth followed 14 years later. I guess four screens brings in a lot more revenue than selling tickets for a single movie each night. 

Four screens has one more advantage for the movie-goer: choice. Most of the movies shown at the Sunset are years old, bringing in middle-aged folks looking to re-watch movies that they grew up with in a new and different theater experience. We'd been tracking the movies playing there for a few weeks before we visited: Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, The Karate Kid, Back to the Future. Classics that I grew up with, all in double feature arrangements. Our choices the night we went? Some horror flicks that I don't remember; Grown Ups / Ferris Bueller's Day Off; The Goonies / Stand By Me; and Grease / Dirty Dancing.

Of course, we opted for Grease. We also opted out of Dirty Dancing. Past our bedtime, I guess.

A quick drive out of Burlington, scanned our pre-purchased on line ticket at the box office, picked a spot we liked facing backwards, grabbed some food from the snack bar, tuned the radio to 99.3 and we're ready for one of 1978's finest movies. 

Two things to explain here I guess. First, there's no requirement to "front in" and watch the flick from the driver's seat (which has a steering wheel all too close to you) and the front passenger seat; probably makes way more sense to tailgate it a bit. Second, no more speaker boxes delivered to your car; just use the FM radio.

The Sunset's Snack Bar. Get the fries. They were seriously awesome. Crispy and salty.

Sounds awesome and easy, right? It was awesome. I mean it really was cool to do this. It just wasn't so easy. Let's talk lessons learned, shall we?

Today's automobiles are far, far more complicated than they were in the 1950s. We own a Jeep Renegade. We've had it for less than two years and before we drove it to Vermont, the mileage on that car was below 5,000 miles. Meaning we don't drive it a lot. And when we do, we just turn it on and drive it like a normal car. We don't tend to park it a lot at night when it's dark (and when it needs to be dark) and just leave the radio on.

First, the interior lights turn on when the engine is off but the electrical systems (to power the radio) are not. There are lights up front, in the back seat and in the trunk and all of them are on. Frantic paging through the owner's manual and pressing buttons and rotating dials got this one mostly solved for a while, although we never managed to turn off the trunk lights.

Next issue: after a while without the engine running, the radio shuts off. Not so good when that's the soundtrack for the movie. It's an easy fix. Just push the ignition button without turning on the engine, but doing that five or so times during a movie is annoying. And, it somehow reset the interior lights that we had managed to turn off. Eventually, we just gave up on the interior lights and left them on.

So we finally have both those issues solved when some dude from the theater walks by. Our fog lights are on. Fog lights? Who even knew we had fog lights? Back to the owner's manual. We followed those directions and I swear, they did nothing. We got them off at one point only to have them come back on after, yep you guessed it, the radio went off and we pushed the ignition button. Eventually another dude came by and told us (again) that our fog lights were on. Dude no. 2 got some tape and some foil and solved that for us.

While all that was going on, we were trying to watch the movie while relaxing in the hatchback of our Renegade, which is not so comfortable for a 5-11-ish, 190 lb-ish man to sit in. We don't have any sort of camping chairs because we don't camp so the hatchback (or trunk, if you prefer) was it. Truth be told here we do have one chair which I picked up on a long weekend watching cars circle a track in Talladega, Alabama but I wasn't about to relax comfortably while my wife sat in the trunk. Not a good look.

So...lessons learned: bring two chairs and buy a battery operated radio. Or figure out how to use all the features of your car. Radio seems easier.

Projection booth built into the side of the Snack Bar. These things have to project a good distance.

All that complaining might seem like I had no fun at the drive-in. Not true.

Would I have preferred things to go seamlessly? Of course. But I know Grease. I've seen it before multiple times, I have the soundtrack and I'm pretty intimately familiar with the plot, although I'm maybe not crystal clear on the past relationship between Danny and Cha Cha. I could stand to be away from the movie for a couple of minutes or so while I'm trying to turn off the lights of our car and not lose track of what's going on.

As a side note here, can I put a question out there? What's with the whole "Beauty School Drop-Out" song? I get the point of the song that Frenchie is looking for a guardian angel to point her in the right direction for her life but how down on women is her Frankie Avalon angel? "You've got the dream but not the drive"? "You're not cut out to hold a job"?? "If you go for your diploma you could join the steno pool"??? I get that this movie was made in the 1970s and it's set in the 1950s but COME ON!! Seriously? That's the guardian angel you want? I'm not sold.

That rant aside, the important thing here was spending time with the person I love most on an August night in Vermont and seeing the best scenes in the movie (namely the Thunder Road scene and "You're The One That I Want" in its entirety) without distractions caused by our car. I got all that. Next time: two chairs and a radio. I got that. Totally got that lesson down.

I could argue Grease was the perfect movie to see at the drive-in. I mean it's set in the 1950s for crying out loud. Heck, it was soooo perfect that there's even a drive-in scene in the movie itself. What more could we want? Other than two chairs and having committed the Renegade owner's manual to memory in advance.

Now I feel I'm one step closer to being immersed in mid-20th century American culture, even if it happened to be a simulation of an experience that was in its heyday 70 or so years ago. I'm sure this was a bit of a tame imitation of that experience all those decades ago and I'm pretty sure that the jet airplanes flying overhead to and from Burlington airport wouldn't have obscured the soundtrack back in the day. But how often do you get the chance when you live where I live to go to a drive-in movie easily and conveniently. I'm glad we did this. Now about that classic car with those fins...and without the fancy radio and light controls.

Getting Edward Hopper-esque at the Sunset Drive-In.

Just to be completely transparent here, despite the title of this post we didn't go on a Saturday. Grease was ending its four week run at the Sunset on Thursday night so we had to go on that night. But no way was I writing a blog post about a drive-in movie without naming this thing after David Bowie's "Drive-In Saturday". I've tried to use song or album titles as much as I can in this blog (The Rolling Stones, The Police, U2, Foreigner, Buckner & Garcia...) and there's no way I wasn't using Bowie on this one. Heck, this whole blog is named after a Bowie song!

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How We Did It

Sunset Drive-In is located at 155 Pointers Point Road in Colchester. It's open in the summer seven days a week weather dependent. All tickets are double features. While we assumed we had to stay at one screen for both movies on a bill, there's probably nothing preventing you from moving your car to an adjacent screen for the second flick. Don't tell them I told you it was possible to do that because I totally don't know that. Check out their website for what movies are playing when.

Showtimes vary during the season with the setting of the sun. When we were there in mid-August, gates to the property opened weeknights at 7:45 with first movie showtimes staggered by screen about a half an hour later. We got there maybe five minutes after the gates opened for an 8:20 Grease start.

There is a snack bar on premises with typical movie theater fare as well as fast food-y meals. If you plan on eating a meal and seeing the whole first movie you bought tickets to, you might want to hustle a bit. The time on a hamburger, some chicken tenders and some fries ran about 15-20 minutes. With just 35 minutes between the gates opening and showtime, that wasn't much time to be a bit late and to walk to get the food. The fries were seriously awesome by the way.

Finally, if you don't take my advice about chairs and the radio, don't complain to me when things go wrong. Enjoy the movie and hope it doesn't rain.

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