After falling asleep after midnight (“It’s still only 9 PM at home”), Joe was DOA at 7:45, 8:00 and 8:15 when I tried getting him up for our 8:30 fly fishing lesson. I’m not surprised that Joe didn’t want to get out of bed seeing that when we arrived last night, Joe walked right into the master, set his stuff down and declared that this was his room. I was happy to oblige, since there are not many days that he gets a king size bed all to himself. He does have the wake-up routine down pat, and we still made it down to the Orvis Center in the retail boutique in the hotel on time.
Our guide welcomed us by noting what a beautiful day it was, which it was, and how the forecast was for no rain today. I told him that my sources came to a different conclusion, but I was happy that we were starting early enough that we may both be correct. He took the two of us over to the pond at the golf course where we learned everything we needed to know about knots, rods, reels, line weights and casting techniques. I had never fly fished and Joe claims to have done it once with my dad. As we were looping our knots, the drops became sprinkles which became a steady drizzle. The gentleman’s bet was edging my way, but as is the case in Vermont, if you don’t like the weather, just wait ten minutes. With an angelic parting of the clouds on our little patch of the 18th fairway, we gave it our best shot. No fish were caught, but there were certainly a suspiciously fair share of risings (fishspeak for “we saw some fish jumping”) for a newly minted, unstocked snowmaking pond. “There are lots of rumors floating around that a couple of guys around here are putting in some brooks and some rainbows. Since this spot doesn’t get much play, it’s going to become the best fishing spot in all of Stowe.” Joe did surprisingly well, getting some good distance and only hitting me in the face with the fly two or three times.
From there, I pointed up the mountain to the top of the gondola and told Joe that’s where we were going next. “You mean I have to hike all the way up the mountain?” “No Joe, today you get to take the gondola almost to the top of the mountain, but you’ve got to hike the rest of the way.” “Is that hard?” “Well this map rates it a Triple D for difficult.” No answer from the domesticated 10 year old flatlander from Southern California. We headed down to the Edelweiss General Store (the apples don’t fall far from the Sound of Music tree here in Stowe) to stock up for our trip and then drove to the gondola. Joe’s slight ambivalence was quickly replaced with astounding enthusiasm once the reality of his first gondola ride sunk in. The intoxication of the E-ticket special wore off a bit when we walked out the gondola into gale force winds, swirling clouds all around us and some chilly weather. “How do I know if I have frostbite?” asked Joe during Question #245 out of 754 that day. “Well first it has to be below freezing, and if that were the case you would be looking at snow on the ground instead of all this water.”
The face of Mt. Mansfield is broken into several features – the nose, the lip, the chin, etc.. We were headed for the highest point – the Chin. To get there we had to take the aforementioned DDD trail up 750 vertical feet which I surmised was a pretty decent hike on a pretty well worn trail, this being Vermont where I think they have high school proms along our path. With both us donning our Tevas (shoes were sitting ready, willing and able in the car), we stepped into the wild. For the first 25 minutes there wasn’t a flat step to walk on. Within five minutes Joe started complaining that he was hot and I told him that he might want to go back and stand outside of the gondola then to cool off. There were some pretty tight spaces we had to navigate, a few sheer faces of Vermont green granite that we had to scale and a few crevasses where I was a little bit nervous as a father where and I otherwise wouldn’t have thought twice. In the end, though, it wasn’t really all that difficult, but I will say that there are a lot of people that just couldn’t do it. Joe, to his credit, absolutely loved it. He said it was like our hike in Hana a few years ago except there weren’t any palm trees. I told him he could turn around and he kept pushing ahead. We finally made it to the Chin – the highest point in the state of Vermont – and as the clouds were swirling around us, the view of the hotel down below and all of the valley opened up below us. It was pretty incredible. We ate lunch, took some photos with the couple dozen other people who shared the moment with us, and then made our descent. On the way down, we could see all the way to Lake Champlain to the west. Joe quickly concluded that this was the best thing that he’s done on the trip (“The hike was amazing, dad, what’s next?”) and that he really loved Stowe.
Back down on earth, Joe and I took it up a Notch by driving up to The Notch (Smuggler’s Notch, a very very windy road through the pass at the end of the canyon where the Stowe Mountain Resort ski area is located). We then headed over to the alpine slide area to get some not-so-cheap thrills, and to our great dismay, the wait for the slide was more than an hour. There were only about 20 people in line, so that didn’t make sense, but the wait for the trampoline was a half hour, and that was also more than we had the patience for, so we headed back to the hotel. Joe consumed his 10th apple from the bowl in the lobby – they got the hint and finally sent us a bowl in our room – and we changed and headed to the pool.
The pool was great, as was the hot tub. Joe particularly enjoyed the ability to enter the pool from indoors and swim through the curvy channel to the outdoor pool. Back in the room, Joe was so enthralled with his digs that he didn’t want to leave. We finally checked out around 2:30 and headed over to the Trapp Family Lodge just to put the suspense out of its misery. Trapp really is a quaint place. Joe liked all of the posters of Von Trapp’s on the walls. We walked through the on-site cemetery, really an idyllic garden with some gravestones (not creepy like Boston at all), and I started looking a little more closely and noticed that Maria Von Trapp was all 8 years older than the oldest child she was looking after. “What’s the big deal with that Dad?” “Well Joe, if your mother passed away, it would be like me marrying an eighteen year-old.” “Your right dad, that is creepy.” I’ll never watch The Sound of Music the same way again.
We then took off for a quick tour through downtown Stowe, but when we got halfway down the hill from Trapp, we were met with mile upon mile of old historic car heading our direction. It was the Annual Classic Car Parade – the biggest event of the year in Stowe I was told. There was no way we were going to just slip into the parade with our vintage 2005 PT Crusier, so we headed out of Stowe, and along the way got a great view of the historic cars. We checked out Cold Hollow Cider Mill, then headed back up to Downtown Stowe, checked out the cars as they passed in front of the judging stand, and then took off for Montreal.
I was told that Montreal was two hours away and that getting across the border was a piece of cake. We were making great time, but when we got to the border there was at least a 45 minute wait – all of the Classic Car folks and a pitifully few number of lanes open at the checkpoint. We finally made it through and as we were turning from one backroad to another in the middle of rural Quebec, we came upon festival #2 for the day – the Quebec National Balloon Show. Hundreds of hot air ballons were all around us. I can’t say that I’ve seen anything like it.
We finally pulled into Old Montreal around 8:30 PM and wow were we in for a surprise. In my complete rustiness, I had no real map of where we were going and my phone’s mapping had some standoff with its French Canadian server, so we finally found our way onto the Rue St. Paul, we met every other Canadian and tourist who wanted to get out that day. It was sheer mayhem of a Mardis Gras scale. When we crossed the Place de Jacques Cartier, there were people all around us in our narrow street like out of some movie. I equated it with Joe as two Third Street Promenades intersecting with each other. We finally made it to our hotel – the Hotel Nelligan (see review) – a very well located chic hotel in a historic building in Old Montreal. We went out and ate amongst our new French friends, checked out the 30 to 40 caricature artistics (it’s like Venice Beach on steroids, only they can really draw here in Montreal), and then returned to our room, exhausted once again.The good news is that we don’t have to wake up for anything tomorrow, and for the first time in three nights the hotel we’re staying in won’t start any construction before 8 am, I think. We’ll enjoy Montreal for a day and then head back to Vermont, finish up with some things there, time permitting, and will then Fly our Friendly Skies back to LA. The USS Constitution was our unexpected pleasant surprise on Day 1, and the hike up Mt. Mansfield was it for day 2. I can’t wait to see what Montreal has in store.
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