more vermont

Still farming in southern Vermont.

Most of our days start with breakfast around 8:30 leading to a morning meeting at 9ish. At the meeting we figure out what everyone is doing for the day and discuss upcoming projects. Maggie usually ends up working in the kitchen (cooking for the winter market or a retreat) and I do something outside (harvesting, working in the greenhouses, fix-up projects). This usually goes until around 1 when we have lunch for an hour and then have a meeting about afternoon work. That work goes until 5 or 6 and then goes into dinner prep. We have dinner and then clean up the dishes.

And that's what our days here look like. We'll be here for about 2 more weeks before we head to upstate new york to work-exchange at the buddhist meditation community.

Then the schedule changes a little bit because some local band from Vermont announced a fall tour and we're going to try to go to as many shows as possible. We're still working on tickets for that extravaganza of the rock and roll.

Vermont is unlike any other state I've ever visited. It's purposely rural, but doesn't have many of the negative aspects of rural life that I've come to recognize from growing up in the south. We'd kind of like to move here... but negative 20.

flannel and cheese: or how we are doing in Vermont

We are here

or more accurately, a little up the street from there because the farm has shifted to a second house, but we split operations between both places. we're working on a family farm that has a booth at a local farmers market and a weekly csa pickup (definition). most days we do some combination of planting or harvesting, taking care of animals (chickens, ducks, and dogs), and helping to run the income sources (csa and farmers market booth).

vermont is as beautiful during the fall as a thomas kinkade painting about fall would have you believe. (if thomas kinkade didn't live in a parallel dimension where all seasons happen at once and "artists" don't actually have to make art to be called artists and make a lot of money off of pictures better suited to bad greeting cards than canvases). Guess we'll just have a deal with beautiful rolling hills with a dozen shades of orange and red trees in a southern vermont valley. Sigh.)

our woofer hosts have three kids ranging in age from 7 months to four years. there are four other woofers other than maggie and me that represent a wide range of interests, ages, and backgrounds.

plus we bought 15 boxes of ice cream at the annual ice cream sale at the local gas station (it's actually good ice cream- not the usual questionable stop and gulp fare).

views from the front porch of the farmhouse:

we moved into the old green house at first. but it wasn't very ideal. (not kidding).

we tried to clean it up, but it was kind of a lost cause (bandanas to avoid mouse "dust") and moved in with another woofer into the old apple barn that had had a lot of work done on it.

much nicer...

Two (of the three) greenhouses

and the farm ducks (that were once pets of one of the kids, but he lost interest. now they just kind of hang out and swim in a puddle in the driveway.)

ok troops! carry on!

It was a Sunny Day in DC

Back from North Carolina and then to DC.

Maggie and I stayed with Emily O and the mighty Finn. Emily still works for NPR and has moved up the morning edition ranks. We've decided that NPR's ratings would triple if they gave Emily 10 minutes a day to talk about whatever she wanted to discuss. Because she's hilarious and her show would be hilarious.

We spent two days wandering around the museums up and down the mall and eating delicious food in China Town.

Oh, and we saw Sunny Day Real Estate at the 9:30 club. Which was kind of something I'd been looking forward to for my entire life. They played most of Diary and LP2, Guitars and Video Games (great song from HIFTBSO), and Spade and Parade. I was impressed by how much the band was in sync- and I think that Jeremy Enigk has a better command of his voice compared to when I saw the band in high school.


what do these characters say? i hope it's a really literal description of hooters. something like really mediocre food served by girls in tight clothes, but if anyone asks you think the wings are delicious. or as emily said: "it's probably not about the wings. because saying you go to hooters to eat the wings is like saying you read playboy for the articles."






awesome light installation.







Tomorrow we leave for our first WWOOF farm in Vermont. Alright.

Blue Ridge Ride and North Carolina

Blue Ridge Ride

I'd planned on doing an average of 60 miles a day for eight days with an average elevation gain of 6500 feet each day. I used a BOB trailer to haul gear behind my cyclocross bike. Long story short, I ended up doing roughly half of the parkway before I decided to call maggie to come rescue me. I enjoyed touring, but learned several lessons that make a successful tour tricky: no matter how strong of a cyclist one is- a fully loaded trailer should be matched with a triple- i rode a compact double with a mtn cassette- but started having really bad knee problems within one day of the tour, not riding for a month and being sick for two weeks before starting and expecting to still have a strong ride is rather silly and i should have known better, and carrying all of the tour's food from the start is also reasonably goofy.

So, all in all, I had a great experience. The parkway is beautiful and i encourage anyone who has an oppourtunity to enjoy some (or all) of the 470 miles. I like touring and will plan another trip (with proper gearing this time!). Pictures below.










Boone and Asheville

After the tour Maggie and I went to Boone for the afternoon, had food at the Black Cat, and walked around. Boone's a nice place, but the traffic (of all the things we didn't expect) drove us crazy. And yeah that was intended. Read the sentence again.

We spent the next day in Asheville- which was fantastic. We randomly ran into Ben Acree... still that's not all that surprising somehow. Ben may or may not be in Denmark right now. We went to the Highland Brewery, lucked into a Magic Hat tasting at a beer store, and had food and beverage at barley's. It was a nice place to be.







And this sign was great (though I didn't understand it)