Vermont - Day 29 - St. J

Will-O-Wood Campground, near Lake Willoughby

Friday, 29 June 2018

today's route

I drove almost entirely across the state of Vermont today, and it took me 2 hours.  It would have taken much less in a different vehicle, but Route 15 was so rough in many places that I had to slow to way under 50 mph to keep from rattling the RV and contents (i.e. pets) to pieces.  Aside from the road surface, though, it was a very scenic drive, although AAA doesn’t say it is on their map.

I passed a pair of hikers, walking in the very narrow shoulder on the other side of the road, with backpacks and 2 poles each longer than ski poles.  They were in the middle of the countryside with no towns or anything around and I wondered where they were headed.

In Johnson (VT) I passed Johnson Woolen Mills – founded 1842 – and am surprised to find that it’s still a going concern, after all these years.

I passed a barn built within inches of the road (the road probably wasn’t there when the barn was built).  The barn’s roof was set so the roof sloped toward the road, and the highway department had put up a sign saying “Watch for Snow from Roof.”  The sign was just before a bend in the road, and I wondered what on earth it was about until I came around the bend and saw the barn.

I passed a farm with a paddock that had a horse and 2 donkeys in it.  One of the donkeys was watching the other one rolling around on its back, just like my dogs do.  It made me smile, just as people do when they see my dogs rolling around.

I passed another farmhouse next to a pond – in Texas it would be a stock tank but I’m not sure it was here, I think it was just a pond – and at the edge of the pond, mostly on the bank, was an enormous inflated very pink flamingo.  It must have been at least 10’ long, and it looked like it was for people to ride around on the water in.  But it was huge and a big surprise in this countryside.

As I passed through Danville, I saw a sign with an arrow directing anyone who cared to the American Society of Dowsers.  I didn’t know there was such a thing.  Their website says there are dowsers for a lot more than just water – minerals, lost objects, energetic dowsers (huh?) and esoteric dowsers (huh??) and more.  I had no idea.

All along the way I saw large patches of beautiful lupines – like bluebonnets though with much less white, which makes them look much bluer.

St. Johnsbury – known as St. J to the entire state - is the population center for the Northeast Kingdom.  Among the principal founders were the Fairbanks family.  The children and grandchildren of the original settlers went elsewhere for education, and several went into statewide politics, but they all seem to have come home to live and work.  In 1889, grandchild Franklin Fairbanks founded what is now the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium and it is a very odd place.  Mr. Fairbanks apparently spent years collecting things and then decided everybody should be able to look at them and built this very Victorian-looking museum.

Fairbanks Museum

museum interior

Eclectic scarcely begins to describe their exhibits.  They have samples of bug art from the 1870s-1920s; tools used by Natives of this area; black-and-white photos taken in the Northeast Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s; exhibits of butterflies and gems and minerals and swords and turtles; explanations of where the drinking water in the area comes from and how species go extinct; artifacts from ancient Egypt and the Pacific Islands and Japan; musical instruments from around the world; demonstrations of how a telegraph and Morse code and electricity work; many examples of taxidermy of birds from North America and Asia and Europe, and of land mammals (stag and polar bear, for instance); an exhibit of VT sheep shearing and rearing: in 1849 Addison County (in western VT where the Rokeby Museum is) had 261,000 sheep and raised more sheep and produced more wool in proportion to its size and population than any other county in the US; and an exhibit about the fossil, found in Charlotte (VT) in 1849, of a beluga whale – it was uncovered when they were building a railroad between Burlington and Rutland, near Lake Champlain, and is now called “Charlotte” and is the Vermont State Fossil.

I like that the lions aren't identical

I had gone to the museum because they usually have an exhibit of antique toys and dolls, but sadly it’s on loan to someplace else right now.  Still, I have to say there is something for everybody. Including the busload of school children that were making plenty of noise but were enjoying the interactive exhibits a lot.

The town of Lyndon, north of St. J, bills itself as the Covered Bridge Capital of the Northeast Kingdom.

My campground is about a half mile north of Lake Willoughby, a lovely lake that I think was carved by a glacier a while back.

Lake Willoughby

I expected this area to be flatter than the southern part of the state, because that’s the way it looks on the map, but it absolutely isn’t.  In fact, I’m not sure there’s much flat land in the whole state.  The Northeast Kingdom really is pretty and I’m attaching a link to more information about it. NEK