Moseying around Montpelier

 15 June 2022

Today was a pretty easy day. We spent all of it within the city of Montpelier. We continued the sleeping in and slow starts to the day, which has been great. I have been enjoying using the tea kettle and some lemon tea with honey in the mornings. Today I added a couple sweet orange buns to go along with it. Ross snacked a savory roll or two with his coffee. Once we got ourselves cleaned up, we grabbed the rickety bikes and headed into town. 

Our first stop was at Rabble Rousers. It’s a coffee shop, plus art, gifts, chocolate, etc. Ross got a coffee and jalapeño scone while I picked up a tiny Filipino macaron - which looked like a tiny cupcake. Everything was very good! We then walked across the street to a little gift shop/general store where I picked up a Christmas ornament. We’ve been growing our ornament collection for a few years now and I love having memories of our travels when we put up the tree each year. But I digress. After the gift shop, we stopped next door to a place called Splash. The owner of Splash is the owner of our Air BnB. She was exactly as I would have pictured someone who put together this house. Kelly is sweet, bubbly, and seems like a free spirit. It was nice to meet her and chat for a few moments. I also picked up some lemon ginger chews while we were in her store. 

After that encounter, we grabbed our bikes and headed down to the state capitol building. The outside of the building is pretty neat. The dome is super shiny and I wonder how much work it takes to keep that dome up to par. It didn’t take us too long to walk around the state house. We listened in on a private tour for a few minutes and learned that the chandelier in the House Chambers is the “Grand Daddy” of chandeliers. The state of Ohio even paid to restore it since they were making molds out of it for their own decorations. We giggled at one of the portraits because it looks like a combination of Jack Nicholson and Adam Scott (aka Ben Wyatt from Parks and Rec). 

After the State House, we moved on to the Vermont History Museum. Lucky for us it is a Blue Star Museum - yay free admission! I learned that they used to have Catamounts in this area, which is like a big Puma or Mountain Lion. No other life changing facts from the museum, but something to see. 

We had two more stops we were thinking about making. We opted to move onto the Green Mount Cemetery. As advertised, there were some neat headstones and the vast majority of them were very old. I think the earliest I saw someone born was 1790. We rode back into town and decided to stop for a snack before heading onto Hubbard Park.

The North Branch Cafe was right at the intersection of where we came from and where we needed to go, so we popped in for a snack. Ross grabbed a veggie sushi roll and I had a masala savory pastry with tomato chutney. Both tasty! Once we had a little fuel, we headed towards the park.

Google was kind enough to warn us that there was a steep hill ahead of us and that was no joke. With bikes that didn’t have working gears, I was walking my bike up the hill in no time. Ross went a little farther, but also hopped off half way up the hill. By this point I was more tired that I thought, so we looked at a map, walked up a trail for just a few minutes and then decided that was enough. Too many bugs, too tired, and no motivation, we turned around and walked our bikes back down the hill (for fear of failing brakes). 

With nothing else planned for the moment, we went back to our place and took a nap! It was much needed for some reason. We got a solid 2 hours in before we decided it was time for dinner. Ross also booked us an escape room for 7pm. We got in the car this time and headed over to Saraducci’s, the Italian place in town. Apparently half the city also was at Saraducci’s but they had a table for us right away. Our waitress looked like my recruiter, Connie Bacik, so that was fun. Ross ordered a mushroom spinach ravioli and I had a veggie angel hair pasta dish. Both were very good, but filling. I took some of mine to go. The service was great and speedy! We made it out just in time to get to our escape room down the road.

We found a new parking spot just a few blocks from the escape room and we were greeted by a super chill dude named Austin. We chatted for a few minutes about why we were in Vermont and then he told us about our escape room. It was board game themed, so we had to play pieces of a bunch of different games to escape. He said we had up to an hour and 20 minutes to get out and it’s usually quite challenging, especially for only two people. Expectations were low, but we battled our way through checkers, monopoly, connect 4, candy land, operation, battle ship, life, clue, and twister to escape victorious in 1 hour 8 minutes! It was a super fun room and we were happy to have escaped! Austin even gave us a nice note on a post card thanking us for our visit. He showed us the other room he was building since we won’t be back any time soon to know his secrets. 

We left the escape room energized, so we weren’t quite ready to call it a night. The Three Penny Taproom was on our list of places to stop, so we bellied up to the bar for one beer. The sour I had was extra extra tart! Nice little place to chill out for a drink or two. With that, it was finally time to get back to bed. We were lucky enough to have a washer and dryer in the BnB, so we pulled our clothes out of the dryer, folded them up and settled in for the night. Tomorrow we move on to Lake Placid/Saranac Lake!

Stats for the day:

Steps: 10,357

Miles biked: At least 5

% of groups who have successfully escaped this room in the past: 25