Burlington VT, Days 2 and 3

Finally catching up on the rest of Eric and my 1 Year Anniversary Trip :) You can read about the first part here.

On Saturday morning, Eric and I decided to go rollerblading on the Burlington Bike Path. The view was amazing...

Both of us are comfortable on rollerblades, but the path was a bit more challenging than we expected...

We still managed to do a good amount of the path despite the obstacles, and it was definitely a good work out.

Next up, we hit a crepe placed called The Skinny Pancake for lunch. I was a little nervous because the reviews were not the best, but everything they said was totally wrong. The food came fast and it was amazing. I got the "Heart Breaker" which was a strawberry and banana crepe covered with Nutella. It was amazing and brought me back to my amazing crepe place in Australia called Pancakes on the Rocks (if you are ever in Sydney, go there).

Post-delicious crepe it was time for Eric to find his friend Champ. In case you are not familiar with Champ, he is an under water lake monster who lives in Lake Champlain. Eric visited Nessie in Loch Ness five years ago, so he is starting to reach his dream of swimming with all the lake monsters.

Even I put my feet in, it was too cold for me though!

In the afternoon, we stopped back at our hotel to get ready to visit the wineries. We stayed at Green Mountain Suites in South Burlington, which was about 10 minutes away from the downtown area. It was a pretty central location especially for exploring a bit outside of Burlington (where the breweries and wineries are) so that was great.

Overall, I really liked the hotel. It was all suites, so we got a bedroom and then separate living/kitchen area. I love having a full size fridge for water bottles and leftovers when on vacation! The other great things were free breakfast (and not a terrible one either), free internet and on weeknights they have a free dinner (only one choice but still) and free beer and wine from 5-7pm. Amazing! It's so funny to me how much MORE you get sometimes at a cheaper hotel. However, the one thing I did not love was the overall smell of the place haha- I really don't know what it was because everything seemed clean but particularly the stairways smelled terrible. Perhaps I am crazy but Eric agreed. Still probably worth staying here though because you can always open windows and there were so many other great things about it.

Enough about that, lets get to the wine! We started at Shelburne Vineyards which is about 20 minutes away from Burlington. All the wine was delicious and the girl who did our tasting was awesome. She's moving to Ireland next year to start her own business where she will lead people on writing tours of Ireland. Awesome? Yes.

After, we headed down the street to Charlotte Valley Winery to taste some more wine. Their view was beautiful...

The wine was good too, but the girl doing it was not as much fun, so we enjoyed our first winery a bit more :) They are both worth a visit though.

For dinner, we visited another Burlington eatery, L'Amante. I ordered a fish special which was delicious...

Plus they served hummus with their bread, which automatically makes me love them.

The last part of our trip happened on Sunday morning when we stopped at the Ben and Jerry's factory on the way home. It's about 40 minutes outside of Burlington so it makes sense to go on the way up or back.

I expected the Ben and Jerry's to be one the major highlights of our trip, but it was actually a little disappointing. I mean, the sample of mint chocolate chunk was delicious, but there were WAY too many people on the tour (even though they have tours every 15 minutes I think!). It was also just kind of corny in general, and this is a kindergarten teacher saying this.... so it was probably super corny to the average person. Also the line to get ice cream after was insane and wasn't moving so we decided to just wait until we can go to a scoop shop our next ice cream. Oh well! Eric and I are always cranky on

Sundays leaving a fun weekend so maybe it was that :)

Overall, I liked Burlington. It's a great weekend trip from Boston. It's definitely a beautiful area and there was more to do than I even expected when I first booked it. However, I don't think I'll be back any time too soon. I have much higher expectations for a place I visit in the summer because I need it to be significantly better than a weekend at the Cape or in New Hampshire to be worth my while to return. Hawaii was that, but Vermont really wasn't for me. Glad we went though :)

What are some weekend trips you go on from your house? Are they awesome enough that you would recommend them to a visitor coming from out of state/out of your area?