Fort Ticonderoga

Hans and Josiah bearing arms against the British

Try to ignore the row of blue dumpsters...looking north towards Lake Champlain

This is one way to get them to pipe down (that's Annika inside the mortar)

If sister does it, then brother must too

Views from the fort

Views from the fort

Annika considers a career tending artillery (check out how elaborate the cannon is)

OK, on a slightly more positive note. Very slightly.

Our vacation continues on its merry way from our painful train ride in North Conway, New Hampshire to Burlington, Vermont. The kids, not surprisingly, fell asleep 4.5 minutes after we got into the car after the train ride and began our slow drive through the White Mountain National Forest. Counting Subarus kept us busy, as did lamenting our fate as the crappiest parents in the universe.


Vermont is gorgeous. I think I stated that in the last post, but wow! I am still a little shocked over how amazingly green and verdant it is (and yes, I know that it is called the green mountain state, thank you). Bucolic is a good word to describe Vermont. Lots of pretty little farms complete with old red barns and white farmhouses. Nice farms. Well-kept farms with nary a trash heap of old lawn-chairs, decrepit mobile homes and 1950s-era cars in the front (or even back) yards. Pretty little towns so full of Victorian homes that my neck still hurts from whipping my head left and right to try to take them all in.


Burlington was OK. I think I stated that Burlington was, for some reason, extolled to be a paragon of urban-planning perfection. I really saw no evidence of this in our travels around Burlington, though certainly it is a nice little city. Lake Champlain and the mountains make a lovely backdrop. We meant to get to downtown Burlington, but we didn't make it, because we had quite the escapade at The Olive Garden...Annika was almost sick again, Josiah was a little bit sick. We waited an eternity for our food, all the while with one eye on the door thinking that Annika was about to puke. We ended up having to get our food boxed up for takeout because we just couldn't comfortably eat while worrying about Annika.


Saturday morning we packed up and left Burlington, crossing over into upstate New York to see Fort Ticonderoga. I'm still in shock over this, but the kids actually seemed to enjoy themselves at the fort. Perhaps because there was a lot of room for them to tear around and lots of naughty things for them to climb on, like cannons. Enjoy the pictures. They don't do the area justice...I would love to return to tour Vermont and upstate New York very slowly someday, stopping at the antique shops and taking a few of those interesting backroads.