Greetings from the wilderness, and by “wilderness” I mean my aunt’s home in Virginia where we are making a comfortable stop indoors on our route south.  But know that I did type this post out in the woods, fireside with smoke blowing in my eyes.

The first stop on our USA-east-coast-going-south-to-introduce-the-englishman-to-my-country-roadtrip was… Vermont!

I would like to thank the Girl Scouts for preparing me for my first time ever putting up a tent and sleeping in it without a parent or guardian present.  After purchasing a handy dandy four-person tent from Walmart—why a four-person tent when there are only two of you, you might ask… well I am a woman who enjoys camping with all of my necessary belongings next to me: laptop, two books, journal and three pens, toiletries, my fuzzy Guinness jumper, an extra blanket, all the necessary equipment to brew coffee first thing in the morning… you get it—and raiding my brother’s camping supplies, we were pretty much sorted for our camping adventure.

There’s nothing like off-roading in a Wrangler to a perfect tiny clearing nestled away.  We found our home for the night.  Our first official Vermont morning entailed skinny dipping in a watering hole in the woods and shrieking the instant our bums broke the liquid surface.  The winding roads took us through the first signs of foliage right up to a roadside stand of Mom and Pop’s Vermont Maple Syrup where we delighted in a maple syrup tasting and a pumpkin whoopee pie filled with maple cream.

We traversed the state to reach all of the necessary tastings that we could within a single day.  After checking into Cabot Cheese Creamery to taste all of the sample flavors thrice, we swung over to tour the original Ben and Jerry’s Factory.  If eating ice cream until you feel absolutely sick is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.  We finished off the day’s tastings and tours with an extremely important introduction between the Englishman and The Alchemist.  Englishman meet Heady Topper.  Heady Topper, Englishman.  There we go.  Now we’re all friends and we’ve cracked open a can of Heady every single night since.  Before searching in the dark for a campsite, the evening ended with mouth-watering Chubby Muffin burgers with my amazing friends and a little wander around downtown Burlington.

This road trip is scheduled to last approximately three weeks and we hope to reach a rather southern point in the USA, which I’ll reveal later.  However, the first three days proved to me that we could have happily spent our entire adventure wandering through the small old towns and the endlessly green woods of Vermont.