t a l l a p e

I spent last weekend up in Vermont, and a post about the trip is long overdue at this point…

The occasion was the wedding of a friend of Kate’s, at the Sleepy Hollow Inn in Huntington, VT.

We were scheduled to leave Saturday morning, but thanks to last week’s slush storm, were a bit delayed. It seems that Kate’s car was frozen to the ground. A puddle of slush formed around two of the wheels, froze when it got cold, and required a full day of rock salt, hot water, and chiseling before the car could be driven. A Friday of yeoman’s work by Kate, and a morning working through the last of the ice, and we were finally ready to go a little after noon.

(An aside: this whole car-being-iced-to-the-ground thing made Kate’s parents decide to add her to their AAA membership. Remember that detail…)

We swung over to Brookline to pick up a friend of Kate’s who was also attending the wedding, and then headed north. We stopped off briefly near Lebanon, NH and White River Junction, VT so as to procure a pair of brown heels, as I’m lucky enough to be dating someone who doesn’t think that it’s necessary to own a pair of shoes to go with every possible combination of clothing. (This goes well with my general policy of owning a pair of Samba’s; and recently a pair of Puma’s as well, because I’m just wild and crazy like that.)

And let me, once again, say that I’m a very lucky guy. Total time from pulling off the highway to pulling back on was around 25 minutes. Which I think has to be about the fastest formal-women’s-shoe-purchasing venture in the history of the world.

So, we keep going up 89, eventually getting to the exit around 6 or so, just as the last bit of sunlight was fading away. We wandered around a bit (there might have been a wrong turn involved that cost us a few minutes, thanks to some dolt who wrote down the Google Maps directions, but didn’t print the map), but eventually got back on track.

Which is when things got really fun.

A tailgater was following us, as we slowed down to read each street sign. Kate saw a pull off on the side of the road, and pulled into it. Except that it turned out that it wasn’t pavement at all, just a place that the snowplow had veered a bit and leveled the snow beside the road to exactly the same height as the road itself. Needless to say, we ended up with the car tilted at a lovely angle, unable to move it either forward or backward, and with the axles sitting around 3 inches above the corner of the pavement.

But: AAA to the rescue!

Calling AAA involved more or less invading the home of a lovely couple, who were nice enough to let us use their phone (as we had no cell phone reception). We sat and chatted with them for a while, until the tow truck showed up to help us out of the ditch. (There was also a brief conversation with a cop, but that wasn’t a big deal. As an aside, the lights that are mounted next to the driver’s window on cop cars are really, really bright.)

So, finally, a little after 7, we got back on the road. Fun with snowy, slippery, hills slowed us down as we drove the last couple of miles, but we did get to the lodge/inn at Sleepy Hollow.

(I promise: no more car fun in this post!)

From the lodge, we headed up the mountain to the cabin. I was on snowshoes, while Kate and Julia were cross-country skiing (hereafter “skiing”). We tossed on our packs, and about 2 kilometers later walked into Butternut Cabin.

By which I mean, we tried to walk into the cabin. But failed, because the door was locked (and of course, no one had given us a key). Fortunately, my city-boy-skillz found us a window through which to enter within a minute or two, and the door didn’t need a key to open from the inside.

We brought in a bunch of wood, and got the wood stove fired up. A brick of soup went into a pan.

And then we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

It seems that bricks of soup (by which I mean a totally frozen, 8″ by 8″ by 3″ brick of lentil soup) are difficult things to defrost.

In the end, we had to break the brick apart with spoons to speed up the defrosting process.

(We also made the mistake of putting some of the logs on top of the wood stove to dry out. Not a good idea, since it seems that the top of the stove was hot enough to catch the wood. And make the cabin incredibly smoky. Oops.)

Sunday morning we headed down to the lodge, and met up with the brides and a number of other friends of Kate and Julia’s — most of them former Harvard skiiers. I rented a pair of skis, and Kate was kind enough to give me a lesson on how to actually get around on them, before the folks who actually knew what they were doing went off for a quick loop around the trails.

After fish chowder (also a brick, but this one defrosted in the lodge’s microwave instead of over a fire) for lunch, I played Scrabble with some of the other guests while Kate and Julia did some more skiing. Once they returned, we got ready for the reception itself in the lodge (and, I must say, we looked damn good). I got to spend a little bit of time playing with one of the cutest kids ever while waiting for Kate, which made me happy.

The reception itself was quite nice. The venue — Sleepy Hollow’s Round Barn — was beautiful. The brides looked fantastic, everyone had fun, I met about 30 people whose names I don’t remember any more. A good time was had by all.

After the reception, Kate and Julia and I changed out of our finery, and back into real outdoors gear. (Which process took some longer than others, depending on their level of distractability.) We headed back up to the cabin, through a very slight snow. My headlamp had broken, so I was hiking more or less in the dark for most of the time (it was also a new moon, or close to it), but the whole thing was quite lovely.

The wood stove didn’t take nearly as long to get going, as we had a bit of experience with the whole concept. We loaded it up, and headed to bed.

Monday morning, I woke up around 6AM, and looked out the east-side windows of the cabin (almost that entire wall was windows). The sun was just starting to rise behind Camel Top MountainCamel’s Hump Mountain, and sky was a brilliant purple — it was a color that I’ve seen on flowers, but never in the sky. Just over the top of the mountains was a band of brilliant yellow light.

I admired the view for a couple of minutes (and woke Kate up to make sure that she saw it as well), then fell back asleep for another hour or so.

I woke up for real, put on my showshoes, and headed down the mountain. It was cold, and crisp, but not uncomfortably so. The snow crunched under the snowshoes. I found myself feeling like I was floating while heading down the mountain.

The crispness, and the crunch of the snow, started to make sense when I looked at the thermometer at the lodge. Which read -16 degrees.

Read that again: -16 degrees Fahrenheit.

That’s cold.

Apparently it actually went down to below -20 overnight.

A nice breakfast with the brides and their families (who were staying at the lodge), and then I found a sofa in the lodge living room and took a nap while Kate and Julia did some classical skiing. (Most of the weekend, they’d been skate skiing; Wikipedia has a good explanation of the difference.) Then, we packed up the car and headed back to Boston.

And, of course, for good measure, we had one last car adventure, this one right in front of my apartment. A large patch of ice looked like an inviting parking space, until Kate tried to pull out. And, well, the car didn’t move so much. Julia and I ended up pushing the car out, but not before Julia had managed to fall and crack her knee on the ice.

All and all, it was a great, great weekend. Relaxed, relaxing…so good.

(If you’re still reading at this point, you get a bonus point.)