Burgers and maple creamees

Last night's Church Street view

This shall be known as the food post, with barely a dash of Lake Champlain mixed in.  Tomorrow, my fellow conference-goers and I are going on a boat cruise around the lake, so if you were a betting reader, I would not bet against never seeing another photo of Lake Champlain on Miles and Laurel.

Last night, a new friend and I walked downtown and shopped the sweetest group of boutiques.  I might have purchased jeggings (pipe down, Blogger spellcheck!) but will probably never fully admit it, even when I wear them.  Sonja and I found a restaurant called The Farmhouse but the wait was an hour, so we ate at a pub on Church Street.  It was just fine, especially the outdoor seating on a 75-degree evening with people-watching galore all around us.  But today, it seemed that everyone at the conference had dined at The Farmhouse to rave reviews...so we had to try again.

Tonight we went earlier, and we snagged an outdoor table.  I ordered tomato-fennel soup and a bacon cheeseburger with Vermont cheddar (and local beef and bacon too, but that doesn't have a ring quite like "Vermont cheddar").  Our meals came with a condiment tray that included root beer barbecue sauce, which was amazing--and I'm not even a major barbecue sauce consumer.  All in all: I'm ready to pronounce that meal the best burger I've ever had.  Please do yourself a service and go here if you are ever in Burlington.

But the Vermont food tour was not complete.  Last stop: the ice cream stand by the lake, for maple creamees.  "Creamees" is the Vermont equivalent to soft-serve ice cream, and this stand boasted maple creamees. The ice cream was perfect, with a gentle but not overpowering touch of maple--as I said so articulately when I tasted it, "like syrup but way better!"

And then, on the shuttle back to the dorms, we were chatting with the driver about Burlington, and I saw my chance and grabbed it: I got to ask a local if he ever forgets to notice the lake.  "Oh, no," he said emphatically, and his face changed in a way that showed how much he loved it. He told us that he lives a stone's throw from the lake, outside town in a house that has seen his family through five generations. "Morning, evening, it's the same water, but it always looks something different."

It'll be hard to top his view, wherever I'll be in 30 or 40 years, but I hope I get a monster-sized kick out of my neighborhood the way he does.

Roar!