We’ve had over twelve guests come stay at our guest room this summer. It’s partly due to my urging of everyone come visit us, but also because Vermont is the perfect vacation destination in the summer. There’s no place like it. Californians can’t get enough of the green, New Yorkers can’t get enough of the peaceful, untouched wilderness. A friend told me my Instagram page acts as the Vermont tourism board and I couldn’t agree more. My excitement radiates off of social media, and it’s not a curated selection of what I want people to see; it truly is that wonderful. I’ve only been here one year, but my heart swells with how much I truly love the home we’ve made here.
My favorite guest of all this summer was Mike. Mike is Casey’s dad and I lived with him for a short period of time when Casey and I were first dating. When I had to leave to go live in Russia, we got drunk and I told him he’s like a second dad to me and he is a handful of older people that I cherish because they always have my back.
We all met up in Long Island for my brother-in-law’s wonderful engagement party. A weekend of fun and festivities, and so much good eating. We returned home with Mike and while we all had to work the week away in our home in the woods, we took time to have a lot of fun. We took Mike to Nepali and Vietnamese food. Whenever we visit Mike, we always get Asian buffet and Korean bonchon so it’s always a lot of fun.
My friend and I just started a small business holding paint-and-sip classes and he got to come to our first one ever. It’s been a lot of hard work and I was proud of how much fun he and other people were having at the event we put together, that I facilitated. One thing Casey and I noticed was that Vermonters loved Mike, because he’s friendly, and fun, and knows a lot about old stuff, which is basically what all of Vermont is.
Casey gave Mike a book of Vermont’s civil war history just a few months prior so he was excited to visit museums and see old forts. So many friends recommended that we take Mike to Shelburne Museum, and I was so glad that my first trip to this outdoor theme park (let’s be honest, it’s hardly a museum in how special it is). Shelburne Museum is a campus of oddities, from a huge steam ship in the middle of a field, to fancy homes they carted from other parts of Vermont to be a part of the museum. We saw weapons, laughed it up with fun docents who told us secrets of the exhibits, and loved looking at old barns with preserved machinery. We saw an old certificate with Abraham Lincoln’s signature, really the highlight of the museum.
I found some giant puffball mushrooms in a field, honestly a mark of a really spectacular day. Shelburne is about 45 minutes from home, so on the ride back we stopped for ice cream, picked up local coffee for Mike to take home, and walked a little in a part of Lake Champlain’s embankment that I had never been.
Summer is over now, with the leaves falling, but I had an amazing time when Mike came. Going to the Shelburne Museum was a blast and I’m glad we got to experience that together.