Burlington,VT Part One

The French Speaking Connection

Our two weeks at North Beach campground had been booked since May. It’s the only campground we booked before shoving off from Detroit. I wrote some scripts that sucked park locations from a handful of the more popular park builder’s websites in to our own Google Map. Now when we’re heading somewhere we can just pull up this Google map of an area and see a curated collection of skateparks. This is what brought us to Burlington.

Andy A_Dog Williams skatepark opened last year and is a work of art at an amazing location. It’s just five minutes bike ride down the waterfront bike path from the campground. Perfect conditions for the boys to have a reprieve from the parental units and recapture a little independence. We planned for our travels around the north east to get increasingly more rustic (read: less skate friendly) as we neared the the Burlington visit and ultimately Camp Woodward. The boys seemed more than happy to trade in fish guts and snapping turtles for smelly skate helmets and scraped elbows.

The Burlington bike path

The campground is run by the state and extremely popular. It’s near the north side of the city and right on the bike path that connects to much the city, so it was not possible to get two consecutive weeks in one spot. Week one had us near the open-during-daylight gate to the path and the beach. We would end up using the path every day we were in Burlington. The path led to:

• the beach
• the skatepark
• the dogpark (Mini’s a jerkface and can only go to empty dogparks)
• restaurants
• the ferry where we dropped the boys’ Detroit buddy off at after a sleepover. He happened to be staying at his Grandma’s in NY across the lake that week
• amazing views of Lake Champlain and the New York Adirondacks
• Hannafords. This Erin’s new favorite grocery store out east. “There’s a Hannafords!” she’ll exclaim when one is nearby where we’re staying. “Hannafords is far” She’ll say solemnly when it’s too far
• Ace hardware - biked there a couple times for parts for a work project

We need a bike path like this in every city. Might as well add a big lake and mountain vista too. Oh and add “The Point” radio station too - it was the background music for the whole stay. Some great, laid back jams!

Our boat rack

The boat rack has become a bit of a saga. Erin would call it a fiasco. I call it almost done every time I spend another ten hours on it. We NEED THIS. It’s how Sandy Cheeks will be easily launched. We can’t be spending an hour digging her out and inflating her every time we want to go for ride, or fishing or exploring some watershed every day for a week straight!

We don’t have a boat trailer for the boat because we’re pulling the camper and apparently it’s illegal to double pull in most states. So instead, we’ll haul the boat from camp to water on top of the truck cap. We have a winch up front that pulls the boat up from behind the truck, over some rollers on to the bunks. This where the modular ⁸⁰⁄₂₀ roof rack shines. To convert the rack for boat hauling, we slide the bike mounts out, and slide the boat stays in. Simple! Okay there’s a bunch of other stuff we have to do to but let’s just pretend it’s simple.

After I printed a couple of roller things (these ended up being huge failures and scraped and dented the truck) all of the components were in place for the big test. Nolan was on the winch, Elliott was on the camera, I was in the back of the truck with the boat making sure it goes up straight, Erin was hiding.

I gave Nolan the signal to start winching (I yelled, “start winching”) and Sandy Cheeks lifted off the ground! I’d say she was entirely off the ground about a foot or so before my fulcrum thingy started failing. Queue the sad trombone, but enter the french speaking Canadian. Dominic was awesome. Here’s a guy who sees a bunch of homemade plywood parts and a few skateboarders failing to put a comparatively large, red, inflatable boat on top of a truck and he jumps right in and starts pushing and struggling right along with us!

Using hand signals and my unnecessarily and overly animated facial expressions Dominic, Erin and I unbent some bent things, made some rigging adjustments and gave it another go. “Start winching” I yelled again. This time I let Erin and Dominic lift the boat with the winch while I did something that I don’t quite remember but it definitely wasn’t strenuous. Thirty seconds of struggle, pushing, yelling and hoping the waaay too stretched bowline mount doesn’t rip off and she was on the roof! Pretty sure I just stood there looking at Sandy Cheeks on top of the truck for a good five minutes. She stayed there all night too. Illuminated by the bon-fire.

Dominic and I would end up having many in-person text message conversations through Google Translate on my phone. I supplied the emoji with my own face and thumbs. He suggested the next iteration of the boat rack: ramps. I didn’t think of ramps. With this new plan, the boat rack is now finally almost done!

More highlights from week one

• Erin fished out the sewing machine and whipped up another set of cornhole bags. They only last for a few weeks before we leave them outside to be turned into corn cement bags by the rain.
• A large crackle in the bon-fire launched an ember directly into Nolan’s roasting marshmallow. This marshmallow probably saved the ember from melting a hole into and deflating nearby Sandy Cheeks.
• Lots and lots of skating. Grabbed a couple beach days too.
• The boys found a food truck that sold them burgers that had glazed donuts as the bun
• Met a fella who worked on nuclear stuff during the sixties. He’s a lifelong boater and the first (and only) person to guess what the heck I was attaching to the roof of our truck. We ended up chatting about inventions and stuff a few times.
• Went to a Lake Monsters baseball game. They won it with a two out, two run double for a 3-2 walk off win. I ate too much popcorn at this game.
• Neighbor had his 80s Jason Jesse board with him to cruise the path. 100% as is from the era - Gull Wings and a Cell Block
• 3D printed some semi-useful stuff
• the park showers were free but required the pass through of a quarter twice in the coin slot to turn them on for six minutes

We had high hopes for our stay and we weren’t disappointed! The boys skated a lot in preparation for their big week at Woodward. Erin and I were able to shore things up a bit more around camp. Mini did her usual thing of making all humans fall in love with her while simultaneously making all dogs hate her. Next up we hitch and and unhitch the camper three times in three days!