I love long weekends. Especially when they include an extra day (Friday) and they're spent somewhere else. This weekend, B and I loaded up our camping gear for the second weekend in a row and headed off for a whirlwind trip to Vermont and upper NY state. We left on Friday and headed straight for the Lake Champlain ferry, which runs between Port Kent, NY and Burlington, VT. We were trying to make it for the 4:45pm crossing, since we didn't have a campsite booked on the first night and wanted to get to the park before the other last minute stragglers. Unfortunately, we got a little confused somewhere near Saranac Lake and ended up having to take the 5:30 ferry. No problem, it wasn't very busy so we were good to go.
We then blitzed to Smugglers Notch State Park, which was where we wanted to stay, and found that they still had some campsites left. (Smugglers' Notch is actually quite a historical place; the surrounding mountains, trails and forests were used to smuggle in alcohol during the prohibition in the 20's. More here.) We got this really nice secluded site at the back of the park. After setting up the tent, we drove into Stowe to get some groceries, and on the way back it started raining. Now, I don't know if it was because of the rain, or because we were trying to light our fire with birch (hardwood), or lacking in dry, smaller wood, but we just couldn't get any sort of fire lit. After about an hour of trying in the rain, we decided that it just wasn't worth it anymore, and spent the rest of the night drinking microbrews in the tent. Well, things could have been a whole lot worse.
We woke up pretty early the next day to get ready for the big hike - Mount Mansfield. The trailhead was just a mile or so up the road from the park, so we headed out early in the morning. The mountain itself is really cool; when you look at it from a distance, it (supposedly) looks like a man's face, and the various peaks on it are named after the facial features, hence the Chin, the Nose, the Adam's Apple, etc. The trail we were taking led us to the Adam's Apple, and then finally the highest point of the mountain, the Chin.
The first thing we noticed was how steep the hike was - probably the steepest ascent we've done yet. Still, I think this was actually the most picturesque trail I've hiked yet, complete with dense vegetation, waterfalls and streams most of the way up. Vermont is just so incredibly green, you'd think it was almost a part of Canada. But anyway, about 1.7 miles in, we made it to a small fork, where the Adam's Apple goes one way (0.1 miles) and the Chin is the other way (0.3 miles). We decided to go up the Adam's Apple first. At this point, we're almost at 4400 feet, so it started getting a little chilly. Without the treeline, it was also getting a bit windy. We were also in a dense cloud, so you couldn't really see anything from the top, which was a little unfortunate, since it's supposedly one of the best views around. But anyway, we went back to the small fork, and began the final ascent to the Chin. 
The sign says 0.3 miles. But what it fails to mention is that it's 0.3 miles more or less straight up bare rock. After a few little tricky bits, we finally made it to the top of the Chin. This is where the views are supposed to be fantastic, but unfortunately for us, we couldn't see anything due to the fog, which was a little anticlimactic. It started clearing up just as we were coming down, though, so we got some photos of the hills nearby when we got back to the fork in the trail instead.
Anyway, once we got to the bottom, we decided that it was time for some real recreation. After stopping back at the state park for a quick shower, we were off to a little place we noticed driving up the road towards the park the night before - a place so full of excitement, I thought B was going to explode, seriously - the Ben & Jerry's factory in Waterbury. Since we were there on a weekend, they weren't actually making any ice cream on the tour, but we did get to walk around the place a bit, indulge in some samples, and then grab some ice cream before we headed off. Super fun. It reminded me a bit of this Roald Dahl book I read once. But I forget which one. After that, we headed back to Burlington, hung out there for a bit to get some coffee and pizza in us, and then headed towards the ferry again. The cool thing about taking the ferry this time was that now we knew which mountain Mansfield was, and it's quite visible over the Burlington skyline. It's a little crazy to think that we actually hiked up two of those peaks, one of which was the biggest one. They were visible almost all the way back to Port Kent. That's ambition for you.
When we docked, we started driving towards the second campsite of the trip, which was just north of Lake Placid, since our usual spot was all booked up for the Québec long weekend. Not a bad place, but with one minor drawback: the firepit had no grill. So, rather than begin hunting for a grill to cook our food on, we decided to throw our arms up, admit defeat, and go for food and pints at the always fantastic Lake Placid Pub & Brewery. When we got back to the campsite, we proved that the previous night was a fluke and got a fire going, and indulged in more microbrews for the rest of the night.
The next day, after getting some breakfast at Soulshine Bagel, and having a random encounter with this feisty duck trying to bogart our bagels, we started driving back to the border, stopping in Massena to play a little Skee-Ball at the arcade, getting some really good Indian food in Cornwall, and then the final drive back to the 'Wa.If you've made it this far, congratulations. This could quite possibly be the longest blog post yet. An odyssey, even. But what can I say, it's been a pretty slow day so far.
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