Day 95 – Last night we had lightning, thunder & a small amount of rain. The sky is dark this morning & the temperature has dropped 10 degrees in 3 hours. Guess a front is coming thru. Breezy, dark & cloudy, 55 degrees at 11:20 a.m.
During the day the temperature dropped to a little below 50 degrees, lots of clouds & windy. Two couples who were temporary campers like us departed & three more sets of vehicles came in and set up, two were seasonal campers, one group was led to their site by JC, so they were temporary. We just hung out watching people come & go, made pancakes, took naps, etc. At 5:15 p.m. the sun came out & the clouds were gone, just a little breeze. The campground sprang to life as doors and windows opened & people came out to play. The little old lady nearest to us got on the riding mower and drove around cleaning up the area; people who had come in earlier today walked over to visit neighbors who’d been here for awhile; campers rode by on their bicycles, or walked their dogs, or strolled down to the Lake. It’s like a little village tucked away by itself.
Rob & I also headed out for a walk, & we wanted to get some pictures of the various trees on the property as they came fully into bloom. We had yet to walk the entire grounds. We strolled around for more than an hour; it was gorgeous out & it had warmed up some with the sun out.
About halfway through we ran into JC – the man loves to chat with his guests – and he walked with us, answering our questions. The place he likes to eat? Yes, the Blue Paddle Bistro is very good, but he likes to go to The Windjammer in Burlington for their amazing salad bar. Yes, he definitely had a plan in mind when he bought this property, wanting always to put nature & the environment first & making a profit last. When he bought it, it was a large apple orchard, and there are many apples trees still remaining on the property. There’s also a group of pear trees that produce delicious pears in the Fall. He showed us cedar trees that were over 100 years old, and a fine oak tree that is 300 years old. When he built the main house, he positioned it between the older trees so that they’d have plenty of room to continue growing. This led to him showing us the stairway he’d built down to the Lake and the view from above – incredible. He led us into the house & said it was okay for Rob to take a couple of pictures. We went from the back patio into the lower floor – this is a work in progress & most of the work has already been completed, but it will have 3 bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen & dining room, and the living space in front of the fireplace. Up to the main floor & living space, which we’d seen before just briefly, with the master bedroom, 1 or 2 bathrooms, another bedroom, kitchen, small & formal dining rooms, and living room, all unpretentious with a very homey feel about it. He showed us the huge stone & brick, central fireplace which heats all three stories, and showed us how they make breads and pizza from the oven which gets its heat from the fireplace, and just how to tell when the oven is hot enough to bake the perfect loaf of bread. We didn’t go upstairs but there’s the third floor above with bedrooms and bathroom(s), and the ever-present fireplace. (All of this with a charming French accent. Rightly so, he’s very proud of his work.)
He led us out thru the large garage which also serves as the campground office, & he walked with us to show us one of the cottages he built & rents out. It was currently unoccupied & had a bedroom, a bathroom, a living room/dining room, kitchenette, and large deck with Lake views and nice trees surrounding it. The cottage had cedar siding and the walls were cedar-panelled, all with trees from his property that had gone down in a huge ice storm that hit VT years ago. He took us down a path with a couple of tent sites, not in use at the time, to an area where he is clearing a place for another new seasonal RV site – up on a small bluff, plenty of trees, great Lake view. He wanted to know what we thought & we got a teeny, very small sales pitch, and it was really tempting, but we mentioned our land in Maine & he understood that we already had our campground to go to seasonally. We had commented on how beautiful the lawns were, and he showed us a campsite nearby where he’d planted new grass just 5 days ago. He said he won’t be allowing anyone to camp at that site until the lawn had stabilized for a couple of months, & that was how he kept the lawn in shape – when it started to become sparse from campers using the space, he put it out of commission until he’d improved the area. Nature & the environment first.
It was 6:30 & JC headed back home; we finished the rest of our campground walk (finding a site even better than the one we are currently in, noting its number for a future visit). Dinner was a quiche from the Keeler Bay Variety Store, a glass of wine for me & a beer for Rob. The girls did lots of racing around the RV, must’ve been the arrival of cooler weather; they’d been very lazy, like us, for a couple of days.