And I sold my GPS!

It was three days well spent. 

And added to the gas stations, the lakes and the museum were several hours of nice backroads meandering in New Hampshire and Vermont.

It happened like this: 

I had a hand-held Garmin GPS unit I bought a year or so ago and never really used so I wanted to sell it.  No one in Florida seemed interested, with the exception of a couple of low-ballers, so I brought it up to Connecticut with me this year and posted it a few places.

Greg in Burlington Vermont responded to my Facebook Marketplace post and agreed to my price.  He wanted it for a trip to Iceland later this summer.

He would have done a pay first and ship deal, but I smelled a road trip.  I hadn’t been up in Vermont in years and I had never visited the northern New Hampshire home of Leslie, my Florida paddling buddy.

So a trip was born; leave Sunday for Bethlehem, NH, two overnights there and on Tuesday swing over to Burlington and head back to Hartford.

Leslie and I and a friend of his used Monday to paddle a couple small lakes up by the Canadian border; East Inlet, where I saw my moose way back in 2016, and nearby Scott Bog.

It was great seeing Leslie in his native habitat, revisiting East Inlet and meandering along delightful two-lane roads in rural Vermont and New Hampshire.  And the ice cream stops were good too!

The Paddle

East Inlet and Scott Bog are a pair of small lakes in New Hampshire up near the Canadian border.  They are both dammed up sections of small creeks that feed into the Connecticut River, which begins just 300 yards south of the border and runs 406 miles to Long Island Sound. 

A messy boundary dispute in the early 1800s involving the source of the river resulted in formation of a little-known independent republic, the Republic of Indian Stream.  It lasted just three years and covered an area now known as Pittsburg, NH.

Here are some photos from our paddle day and a map of the area.  Click on any image to see them all full size.

The Museum

The eclectic Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, VT, is worth a stop.  My photos don’t do it justice I’m afraid, and I did not tour the whole place.  It’s a large, 45-acre campus and includes 39 exhibit buildings, 20 of them are 18^th and 19 century structures of historical importance that were relocated to the museum from elsewhere in New England and New York.

Be prepared to walk and go on a nice day.

It was founded in 1947 by Electra Havemeyer Webb, a pioneering collector of American folk art. Impressionist paintings, folk art, quilts and textiles, decorative arts, furniture, American paintings, and an array of 17th- to 20th-century artifacts are on view.

Shelburne’s collections are exhibited in a village-like setting of historic New England architecture, accented by a landscape that includes over 400 lilacs, a circular formal garden, herb and heirloom vegetable gardens, and perennial gardens.

I perused the brochure at the entry building and decided to walk to the circus display and the toy museum and call it a day.  The place has two hand-carved wood circus models. The Arnold Circus Parade was made between 1925 and 1955 and forms a parade more than 500 feet long, with 4,000 one-inch-to-one-foot scale figures, including clowns, acrobats, animals, and circus wagons. The Kirk Brothers Circus is a miniature three-ring circus, complete with an audience, comprised of more than 3,500 pieces. Edgar Kirk fashioned the figures over a period of forty years using only a treadle jigsaw and penknife.

I found the toy collection pretty uninteresting and to add insult to injury it was at the far end of the property.  By the time I finished seeing it I was tired and ready to hit the road again, but it was a long uphill walk to the exit. 

One highlight of the place, and visible from just about anywhere, is the Ticonderoga.  This restored 220-foot steamboat is a National Historic Landmark and the last walking beam side-wheel passenger steamer in existence.

Built in Shelburne in 1906, it operated as a day boat on nearby Lake Champlain, serving ports along the New York and Vermont shores until 1953. In 1955, it was moved two miles overland from the lake to its present home.

The Gas Stations and a Couple of Oddities

My meandering also took me past two classic recycled gas stations, one housing Haynes Real Estate in Claremont, NH, and another home of The Spot Restaurant in Burlington, VT.  And yes, these photos are now part of my collection.

I also drove past the sad face of a dilapidated home in Pittsburg, NH, and a freshly-painted piece of yard art made of old fire hydrants in Shelburne, VT.

All in all a very nice trip. Everyone should get out of town once in a while.