Mark & Robyn's 251 Adventure

Date Visited: July 18, 2015
Website

Having visited Wells and Middletown Springs we decided to circle back toward Danby and wound up in Tinmouth; up being an operative word as it appears to reside on the crest of a hill. We got there via a road we decided we had not traveled before. In large part it was like driving through a beautiful forest. We eventually came to the town center where we decided to grab a creemee at the Tinmouth Snack Bar, while we took in the town center, which honestly does not take too long.

Tinmouth is home to SolarFest where people gather to discuss better and more sustainable ways to live, attend workshops and exhibits, eat good fair food and listen to outstanding music. Tinmouth is also known to locals as the home of Tom Peters who achieved fame through his seminal work In Search of Excellence. If one is a fan of contra dancing, Tinmouth’s community center is a once-monthly destination for that activity.

And so having seen most of what Tinmouth has to offer, we decided to meander towards home and wound up on the Tinmouth Road leading back to Danby. As we came to the left hand turn directing us to Tinmouth Pond we decided to check that out. Not surprisingly it did lead to the Pond (actually a small lake) where we could find no public access to the water. As we continued down Scottsville Road we found ourselves traveling deeper and deeper into what you might call the real Vermont. It’s not the Vermont you will see on the pages of Vermont Life magazine. For many Vermonters, life is a hardscrabble existence and yet there was a sense of community in the sometimes ramshackle, sometimes well-kempt dwellings lining both sides of that winding washboard of a dirt road.

We had no idea where we going to end up but lo and behold we dumped out onto Route 7 just a few miles north of our home. We deemed the day a worthy adventure.

Date Visited: July 11, 2015

Chester, VT Website
Wikipedia Page

If you’ve lived in Southern Vermont as long as we have and have needed to travel east, you’ve probably passed through Chester on Route 11. What we learned yesterday, however, that Chester is more than just a place to pass through. And like so many tourists out and about on a perfect summer day, we stopped and looked around a bit.

The first thing you notice coming into Chester is the interesting architecture; particularly lots of Victorian style houses. Fancy slate work roofs, loads of gingerbread fretwork, and wrap-around porches grace large roomy houses, any of which would make a postcard bed and breakfast. For you architecture buffs/nerds you can expect to see early 1800’s Federal and 1830’s era Greek Revival as well as Queen Anne and early 20th Century Colonial Revival…at least that’s what the brochure says. Both of us had childhood fantasies of living in a Queen Anne style house in a tower room, a turreted, many-sided hideaway.

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Date Visited: June 6, 2015

Links: Poultney Chamber of Commerce – The Story of Poultney – The Poultney Historical Society

Vermont Route 30 runs north from Brattleboro in the southeast corner of VT,  to Manchester, jogs west through the Mettowee Valley and then meanders north to Middlebury. Following it from a middling point in Pawlet, just over Dorset Mountain from our Danby home, in about 30 minutes you come to the town of Poultney, the first destination of our adventure.

The choice to start with Poultney was based on Robyn’s desire to visit the yearly Poultney Town-Wide Tag Sale, a favorite of hers, and one of the first “events” of the VT summer. So while this is certainly not our first visit to the town, we aimed to look at it with new eyes, new interest.

Our trip there took us through the beautiful Mettowee Valley where [dairy] farms will always be seen on both sides of the highway because of land covenants, past lovely Lake St. Catherine and its State Park. Mark used to spend a lot of time fishing that lake which is partly located in Poultney.

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