A Weekend Ashore

Jenny's House
South Burlington, VT

We sailed across the lake to Burlington on Saturday morning. I was feeling that I had been made the fool twice over. First, we spent all day Friday hiding out from the cold front and severe thunderstorms that were supposed to come. They never came. Second, we rented a mooring in Burlington because there is no place there where you are allowed to anchor and land a dinghy. I then learned that they hiked the price 50% last year from $0.50 to $0.75/foot for a mooring.

Oh well, it was nice to be back in Vermont anyhow. The weather Saturday and Sunday turned out to be spectacular and the views of the lake and the mountains soon lifted my spirits. I find that the clearer the air in Vermont, and thus the farther one can see through the haze, the gladder my heart.

The best view I every enjoyed was on a fall day in the early 1990s. I was flying a glider over Stowe at 12,000 feet. There were mountain waves that day and I was able to climb in a wave until the wind speed matched my air speed. At that point I was motionless relative to the ground. It was like having a lawn chair in the sky. The air was perfectly clear. I could see Mount Wahington in New Hapshire 100 miles to the east and I could see all the way across the Adironack Mountains in New York to Lake Ontario 150 miles to the west. It was grand.


To finish a fine day, Libby and I took Jennifer and her boyfriend Christian out to dinner. It was a treat for all of us. Jenny and Christian work very hard. They do full time jobs during the week and odd jobs evenings and weekends. During the summer months they almost never get a day off. Therefore, a night out with family and without the need to cook was a treat for them.

On Sunday, Libby went off with Jennifer on one of Jenny's landscaping missions. In the afternoon we all met in Burlington to watch the Dragon Boat Festival races. The idea is to get a crew of 22 people to man a Dragon boat. Burlington had 87 crews from local businesses and community groups. Then they race 1/4 mile sprints. It was great fun to watch. Burlington is really a beautiful and actively alive place.


After the race, Jenny took us for a tour of her new company, Coffee Analysts. We were stunned by the beauty and elegance of the setting. They remodeled a building right on the shore of Lake Champlain. The interior is not only functional, but also very stylish and beautiful, as befits their role in the coffee industry. The master piece though is the wonderful view out the windows of the lake and of the Adriondack Mountains on the far side of the lake. Sunday was a particularly nice day. The scene was dotted with numerous sailboats out on the lake to make the scene perfect.


Wow, I've only seen two other offices with equally nice views. One was an engineering consulting firm whose windows looked out over the Oslo Fjord in Norway. The other was a bank in Seven World Trade Center in NYC that looked out over the WTC boat basin, the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson river in New York. (That building, sadly, collapsed on 9/11/2001.) Personally, I don't know if I could ever get work accomplished if I had an office with such a splendid view. At least not until the day I retired and switched my profession to sailor. :)