lookashiny | Entries tagged with rural ramblings

The town I grew up in has a ski resort in it, so there's a fair amount of shops and restaurants that have opened over the years for the tourists. A lot of the ones that were around when I was a kid are closed now, but I feel like talking about them anyway. (The closed restaurants will be marked as such, all others are still open.)

1. The Cupboard Deli: One of the most popular places in town. Everyone goes here for sandwiches, baked goods, and snacks. They have a huge variety of wraps, of which my favorite is the meatballs with marinara sauce. Their donuts are delicious as well, though those are put out in the morning and are usually gone by 10:30-11. The chocolate ones with whipped cream filling are the best. They also have a seasonal ice cream window that's open in the summer. Get the maple creemee.

2. Dinner's Dunne at the Windridge Bakery (closed): I'm pretty sure that's how it was spelled. This place closed when I was in middle/high school. It was open for breakfast and lunch, but my family mostly went to breakfast there. The one time I remember going there for lunch, I got chili. It was good. Usually, when we got breakfast, I got pancakes or biscuits and sausage gravy. It was good food. They baked all their own bread, too, so the toast was always tasty.

3. 158 Maine: The current restaurant in the space Dinner's Dunne was in. It's fancier and serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I've had their biscuits and sausage gravy, which is very tasty. At dinner, they have a really good scallop dish that's kind of like chowder, and it's topped with fried onion strings. Their hot chocolate is also really good.

4. Cafe Banditos (closed): This was a Mexican restaurant that closed in 2001ish. I went there a couple of times. I remember getting a chicken dish with cheese and salsa that was really good. There's an Italian restaurant where this used to be that I have never been to, though it opened in 2002 or so.

5. Brewster River Pub and Brewery: I haven't been here for a while, but it has good food. They have music sometimes (or did) and they have a volleyball court and a horseshoe area. The fish and chips are very good. They have a nice deck where you can eat if the weather is nice.

6. The Mix (closed): I loved this place and went to it a lot. It closed in the summer of 2016. They served breakfast and dinner; I was usually there for breakfast (often with my mother). I nearly always got the creme brulee french toast with drunken blueberries (seriously drunken blueberries, they made my mouth numb), which was delicious. Their omelettes were great as well, as was the breakfast flatbread. I did go there a couple of times for lunch, but I don't really remember what I got those times. It was always good food, though.

In Vermont, we have a fifth season, Mud Season. It's that time in the spring when the snow is melting and it's rainy, so there's mud everywhere. A lot of the roads in Vermont are dirt, too, so it makes going some places into a dirty slog. All-in-all, it sucks. But at least it means warmer temperatures are on the way.

One of the things I always hated about where I grew up was the long bus ride I had to take to get to school, from kindergarten through 12th grade. It took half an hour to get to the elementary school on the bus (a five minute drive, otherwise) and nearly an hour one way to get to the high school (25 minute drive).

The wait for the bus was also hard. I was never one of the lucky people who lived in a place where they could see the bus coming from inside. I had to walk to the stop before hand or else miss the bus. At least there was a gas station across the street from my first bus stop that I could stand inside to wait when it was really cold. Starting in 7th grade, I was at different stops that didn't have places nearby where I could wait where it was warm. (Some of the kids who waited at my later stops got to wait in a car, but they never invited me to.)

At least I never got car sick, so I was able to read on the bus. I read a lot of books there, especially when I was in high school.

A lot of people associate Vermont with maple syrup and vice versa. The state tree is the sugar maple, the state quarter has a maple sugaring scene on it, there's a Maple Festival in Saint Albans every year.

It's for a good reason. Maple products are all over the state. Lots of people have sugar shacks where they boil the sap to make syrup. Pretty much every Vermonter kids learns how many gallons of sap are needed to make one gallon of syrup (it's 40).

Vermont's domination of the maple industry is because it, along with the other places that make syrup, have both sugar maple trees and the right climate for sugaring. Maple sugaring season starts some time in February, usually, once the temperatures rise above freezing during the day, but drop back down below freezing at night. It continues until the temperatures stay above freezing all the time and the trees bud. When the sap only flows during the day, but freezes at night, it stays sweet and tastes good as syrup. As soon as the tree forms buds, though, the taste changes and gets funky.

The Vermont Maple Outlet is in my town. It's a store that sells mostly maple products (syrup, butter, candy, ect), plus some other foods and gifts. They make a breakfast gift basked with syrup, pancake mix, and jelly, among others. They also have maple creemees (soft serve ice cream) in the summer, that are very good. During the sugaring season, the family that runs the store makes syrup in a demonstration area of the store that they built when I was in high school. If you are in the area during the season, I recommend checking it out.

My grandfather had a sugar shack where he made syrup up until I was in high school or early college. These days, a guy who lives near the woodlot the shack is on taps the trees, so someone is getting something out of it. When I was a kid, my parents and I would go up to help my grandfather haul the sap buckets down to the shack and empty them into the holding tank. Grandpa was the only one who looked after the boiling sap, because none of us knew how to. One of the things we would have was sap tea, made out of hot, but not congealing sap. Grandpa would dip out the sap in mugs, and we would steep tea bags in it. They wouldn't need sugar, since the sap was already sweet.

I have always loved maple stuff. Maple candy, maple syrup, especially maple ice cream. My favorite Russell Stover candy has always been the maple cream. It's such a tasty flavor and it always reminds me of home.

I have found a couple of links here and here for The Cambridge Pharmacy, Inc., which was apparently started in 1980. I think it's meant to be the same place, though the info is, of course, outdated.

1. The Saddest Strip Mall That Ever Existed: This doesn't physically exist, there's a Lowe's superstore there now. However, from 2001ish to 2008, when that moved in, this was a decaying, mostly empty strip mall. In the late 90s, there was an Ames Department Store, a Grand Union grocery store, a Fashion Bug, and a Chittenden Bank (a local bank chain now owned by People's United). The bank moved across the parking lot to it's own building, and the Ames and Grand Union closed within a year of each other. For about seven years, then, all there was was the Fashion Bug. They were lucky if they got two or three people in the parking lot at once. I went in there with my mom to buy something once, it wasn't that great.

2. Champlain Mill: This one still physically exists, and I think it's trying to be a commercial space again, but apart from the new Waterworks restaurant, all the places that used to be there are gone. It's a building by the Winooski River that's mostly offices, but before they put a huge roundabout in downtown Winooski, there were a couple of floors of stores in it, too. There was the official store for the minor league baseball team (then the Vermont Expos), a sock store, and a stationary store (called the Paper Peddler), among others. The one I went to most was the Book Rack and Children's Pages, an independent bookstore that moved to Essex after the shops closed, before closing in 2008 or so. Brian Jacques, the author of the Redwall books did a reading and signing there that I went to, and got my copy of Legend of Luke signed.

3. Burlington Square Mall/Burlington City Center: This place only recently ceased to physically exist and is supposedly under redevelopment, though that's taking a while. When I went down to Church Street in Burlington, I'd spend at least some of the time here. It was a small mall, with a Filene's/Macy's at one end and the entrance to Church Street at the other. There were two restaurants as a "food court", a Chinese restaurant and a pizza place. The first Hot Topic I ever went to was there, as well as a Walden Books before that chain went out of business. There was an fye store, PacSun, a Spencer's, a Payless shoes, and I think there was a Claire's there, too, though that may have been at the University Mall. There was also a place called Tradewinds, that sold imported crafts and home goods. There were also a few other stores I don't remember.

The Cambridge Pharmacy and Gift Shop was an odd place. I'm not sure when it opened, but it closed somewhere between late 2004 and mid 2005. There is, as far as I can tell/google, no trace of it on the internet. The Cambridge General Store, that closed a few months later, at least has a few outdated website pages come up when you search for it.

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I was born in Vermont and grew up in the town of Cambridge, population roughly 3,000. My family never moved, so I spent all of my first 18 years there, minus vacations to other places. There's two villages in the town, Cambridge Village and Jeffersonville. I grew up in Cambridge Village, the smaller, more residential one. People mostly know of the town because of Smuggler's Notch Resort, a ski resort, though they tend to think of it as being in Jeffersonville (it's address is there, but it's not actually in the village, it's in the town).

I had what I consider a fairly idyllic childhood. I was allowed to go basically where I wanted around the part of the village closest to my house, as long as I told my parents where I was going. I had a couple of friends just across the street and there was a playground across the street as well. The store on our side of Route 15 was accessible by going cross lots, and so was what was then the Cambridge Marketplace, that held the Cambridge Pharmacy and Gift Shop, Cambridge Cutters (a hair salon), a Showtime movie rental place, and a couple of other stores.

I have a few vague ideas of what I'd like to post about, but does anyone have anything they really want to hear about? If it's a short thing, I'll just answer in comments, but otherwise I'll put it on a list of post topics.