Vermont!

 Brad and I took a weekend trip to Vermont to go camping in mid-September.  We were surprised to see that the leaves were well into their color change, since there was no change just a couple hours south in Newport.  The weather was beautiful for our weekend.

We drove to camp at Emerald Lake State Park just north of Manchester, VT.  This State Park is great with heated showers, lots of trees, a beautiful lake with paddle boats, canoes and picnic areas.  We arrived fairly late friday night (getting there at 9 p.m.).  Since we had made reservations we headed right to our site, to find the area deserted, all the other campers and RVs at the park were in the other areas.  Setting up our tent we started our campfire and took it easy.

The next morning, after getting up we headed to Manchester for breakfast.  Manchester, VT is an interesting place with many high end outlet stores and restaurants.  We ate breakfast at the eclectic little restaurant called Up For Breakfast.  Not only is it a cool name, you had to go upstairs to the second floor to get there.  We then walked around the town and checked out some stores, including a neat bookstore and some cool antique shops.

 Since one of the reasons I picked this place to go was so we could hike to Lye Brook Falls, we headed off up the trail.  We found some neat rocks (collecting rocks is a new hobby of ours) and enjoyed being in the woods.  The waterfall itself was a bit disappointing and the hike there is almost all uphill, so we didn't enjoy it as much as we wanted to, but it was beautiful in the woods on a beautiful day with the colors changing all around us.  We then went back to our campsite to enjoy steak and potatoes for supper cooked over the campfire, with a bottle of Chianti Classico :-) accompanying it.

 The next day we packed up our campsite and headed back, planning to spend the day stopping at anything that struck our fancy on the drive back.  After getting breakfast at a neat donut shop in town, we headed out.  We stopped at covered bridges, looked for rocks in river beds, checked out antique shops, and more.

At one antique shop we found a big ship's wheel at a bargain price and bought that as well as a 1943 edition of the Bluejacket's Manual.  This place had an old barn with a bunch of stuff in it, in addition to the house filled with antiques.  The barn was creepy, with the boards bending significantly under our weight, with no lights and FILLED with stuff.  Brad was scared he'd fall through!