Chop Chop Billy Goat

We spent a week in Vermont, right on Lake Champlain. It was awesome! Every time we went down to the lake, I practiced skipping rocks, and by the time we left my record skip was six or seven. But one day I got tired of skipping rocks, and I decided to go swimming in the fifty-three degree water. I actually did a complete dunk, and I swam a few feet. Then I ran back to shore, freezing, but after a few minutes I was back in the water. When I came out of the water, Little Kid was getting frisbee throwing lessons from some college boys.

When I was playing outside one day, I saw a bird go into a stump near the RV.  Later, I looked in the hole and saw a two or three tiny baby birds that didn’t even have feathers yet!  It was so cool!

While we were in Vermont, we went to see a granite quarry to learn about how they mine the granite. First, they choose a large section they want to pull out and drill holes on the bottom and sides. They separate the sides with wedges, and then they fill the bottom holes with dynamite. It literally lifts the whole section of rock! We didn’t get to see any dynamite being exploded, but we did get to see some granite being lifted out. We went to the outdoor granite bowling alley, where they have to have rubber bowling balls because the granite is so hard that bowling balls just crack. I won! We also toured the factory, where they make tombstones. On our way back to the campground, we drove by the capital building in Montpelier which is made from the quarry’s granite.

One day, we went into Burlington. We spent the morning walking around the pedestrian mall, which was really fun. I got a flint so I could try to make a fire without matches. Also, we went to Bernie Sanders’ office, which Ma and Pa were really excited about.

One thing we did in Vermont was see the castles. Castles in Vermont? Well, they were two feet tall, and made of pebbles… but they still were cool! Ma had found a fun geocaching thing, so we went to every castle counting planters and red roofs. Then, I did some math to find the rest of the gps coordinates, and we headed down a trail towards the cache. When it looked like we were near the cache, Ma and I ran off into the woods, digging and lifting logs. We must have walked over the cache almost ten times before Pa, who was going a little slower, said, “um, it is right here.” Little Kid got a weird cow thing, and I got a pretty little bag from the cache. On the way back, we stopped to see a house surrounded by a forest with 400 brightly colored birdhouses. The person who lived there built the birdhouses for swallows, who eat mosquitos, and he kept adding more until he could sit outside without being bit by mosquitoes.