I have been remiss is introducing you all to the newest Shoreham Inn family member (though if you ‘like’ us on Facebook, you will have met her) -

Meet Ermintrude!

She’s one of the Cows Come Home cows that were in and around Burlington last year and Dominic and I became enchanted with the idea of a cow in the back garden. And so we set our sights on a few we liked, Ermintrude always being our favorite, and then waited for auction time. The auction proceeds went to benefit The Vermont Campaign to End Childhood Hunger, so even better as far as we were concerned. A few we liked started to get too expensive for our blood, but Ermintrude steadfastly remained within our budget. The final day of the auction coincided with us being in Mexico with friends, so we had a very funny evening in the lobby of our resort (the only place there was a wireless internet signal) huddled around Dominic’s netbook, realizing that we needed to explain to Bruce that we were not buying a real cow (after he asked one too many questions about whether we had space for a cow, what do cows usually cost, and how do you care for cows – we thought he was being funny the whole time, he is a stand up comedian after all, but in fact he had somehow missed the fact that this was an art cow) and counting down to end of auction time in Burlington. You never saw a bunch of people from LA so excited about a cow. We toasted her with crazy tropical cocktails afterwards.

The next best bit, which I missed, was Dominic picking up the cow from a warehouse in Burlington and having to figure out how best to position her in the bed of our 1985 Chevy truck (with plow already attached) for the ride home to Shoreham. He finally decided on lying down, with her head peaking out of the bed. Wow, I wish I had a photo of that. He said the looks he got at traffic lights were pretty priceless.

And home she came. We had a brief flurry of names until Ermintrude really became the only contender. She’s named after a cow called Ermintrude from a TV program Dominic grew up with called The Magic Roundabout – one of those TV shows that only could have been made in the UK in the 60′s and 70′s. And we love her. We were exactly right, she looks great in the garden, particularly striking in the snow, though she will also look lovely surrounded by green grass. Welcome Ermintrude.

I know, I know, I shouldn’t even type it. I’m picturing the spam activity already, but it’s just too good not to use. We’ve got hookers in our parlour once a month here at The Shoreham Inn. (And by the way, I know I’m spelling ‘parlour’ the British way, but it really, really does not look right to me spelled ‘parlor’. So, apparently our hookers are anglophiles)

Alright, Rug Hookers. There, I’ve burst the bubble. There is small group of local women who have begun gathering here once a month, on a  Monday night to have a glass of wine and hook rugs together. There is one woman who has been hooking for 30+ years and others who have only just begun. (including this bartender, who just learned to hook this week. Hooker behind the bar! OK, I’ll stop) One who has a project she’s been ‘working’ on for 10 or so years. Another woman who I think brought embroidery last time but the camaraderie is too good to pass up, and I don’t think there is a ‘hookers only’ requirement.

I don’t know if you have seen many hand-hooked rugs (and by the way, these aren’t the same as the yarn latch-hook rugs that we did of Tweety Bird when we were 10) but they are gorgeous. They look like touchable paintings, so full of color and variations. Patterns and subject matter vary widely as well as size of finished object. Just like knitting, when you can just make a scarf or a hat before graduating to a sweater, with rug hooking you can make a small pillow or decoration before embarking on a actual rug. I’m completely fascinated myself, and winter is just the perfect time for a cozy craft project. Hooking can keep you warm……(OK, NOW I’m done with the hooking jokes)

Hi there, been a while, hasn’t it? Well, here we are again, home from a great vacation and, as every year, scrambling to catch up with the holidays. Hannukah has thrown me for a loop this year, being so early, but luckily my Jewish friends like to embrace the idea of a month of gifts. Mine will be the later ones.

I’m heading out tomorrow to The Vermont Book Shop to get books for my niece (she’s two, so I can write that here without spoiling anything) and I got to thinking about how much shopping I could do locally. I mean REALLY locally, as in Shoreham. So I thought I’d make a list:

Red Sled Farm: Christmas tree

Vermont Trade Winds: Wreaths, maple candies, syrups and pies

Phenomenal Fudge: Fudge, obviously

Whistlepig Whiskey: Straight Rye Whiskey

Toot Sweet Bakery: Cookies, scones and cakes

Shoreham Upholstery: Have something upholstered – maybe an unusual gift, but I don’t know who you shop for, do I?

Platt Memorial Library: Donate to the Friends of the Platt in honor of someone and help a good cause

Joe Bolger: Paintings

Carillon Cruises: Gift certificate for a summer cruise on Lake Champlain

If I wanted to be really late with gifts, rumor has it we’ll have local wine soon (I know, WINE, in SHOREHAM! How lucky are we?!!?)

I think I could even go on from here…certainly if it were summer or fall I could add in the orchards and farms that produce locally. So, lesson to myself, stop, think and plan a little, and I could be done by tomorrow night! Off to the Shoreham Post Office on Wednesday, job done!

We get lots of things in the mail because of the business we run. We ordered one handicapped parking sign last year and you wouldn’t believe the size and quantity of catalogs we have received ever since. One catalog came in a box it was that big. I’m not joking. We get magazines about business in Vermont, about drinks and bars, about the restaurant business. I mention this because in one of these magazines recently, there was an article about how to encourage regular customers to come to your place of business. And it got me thinking and feeling thankful.

The Shoreham Inn has a wonderful, loyal, funny, and did I say wonderful, set of regular customers. We’ve even been doing this long enough that we’ve got regular Inn (as in staying the night) customers too. They are the backbone of this place, they are the reason the tourists or other one-time guests comment that they feel like they have really felt a part of a community while they dined with us. We set out, crossed our fingers, and hoped to create a pub, like an English or Irish pub would feel. But after the 200 year old building and some painting and setting the mood, the real trick was how embraced we became by the people in our community, both Shoreham and the wider local net that we serve. We haven’t taken any training courses in building customer loyalty. We don’t have a customer rewards program. But I thought I should take the opportunity and say thank you in some public forum.

So, thank you regular customers of The Shoreham Inn. Thank you for your patience, your suggestions, your criticisms, your humor, your encouragement, your willingness to be flexible, your understanding of the busy season for us and your ability to put up with longer waits and a little more chaos, your driving through snowstorms to give us some business on quiet winter nights, your offers of dishwashing and of errand-running, your bringing of herbs and vegetables from your gardens, your entertaining our out of town overnight guests, your sharing celebrations with us. We feel lucky, grateful, well-cared for and occasionally just a little bit smug. Thank you.

It’s that time of year again, Addison County Fair and Field Days time. August 10 – 14 are the dates for this year’s Field Days, located just up the road from us, in Addison,VT. This is the granddaddy of Vermont Fairs, the state’s largest agricultural fair and full of all kinds of activities, from carnival rides, cattle judging, tractor pulls, demolition derbies, fried dough, photography contests, maple syrup exhibits, handcrafts, more fried food, food contests, fruits, vegetables, flowers, horse show – you get the idea (and more fried things).

I nurse a secret love of this kind of event, being a Midwest girl at heart with vivid memories of state fairs and the world’s largest pig and live country music and pie contests. I will confess that I have never eaten a corn dog.  Innkeeping life being what it is, I’ve never actually been to Addison County Field Days, but I bug Dominic to take me every year. Partly I feel this experience is missing in his education of life in the US, mostly I just want fried dough and a look at the county’s largest green bean. One day we’ll get there.

So you will have to attend for me; come to Field Days, if you stay here at The Shoreham Inn we promise not to fry one element of your breakfast, so you can indulge to your heart’s content while watching the draft horses or handmowing, riding a ferris wheel and looking at antique farm equipment.

Surprise! I have another interesting innkeeper day out to talk about! See, it’s not all work, work, work around here.

This week, after serving breakfast, seeing our guests on their way and then having tea and toast and watching England and the USA World Cup games simultaneously (well, watching the England game – they get first dibs in this household – and then switching over to check up on the end of the USA game, to manage to just barely see four of the most thrilling moments of sports ever) we drove to Albany, NY to get my car serviced. As I have explained previously, nothing happens around here without a chore attached.

I will pause here to say that I love my car. Here is an old picture of me with my car. I will never change my car. And if I keep up my current driving habits I will just about hit 100,000 miles as I go so blind I will have to be removed from my car. Yes, we were taking my car in to get a new battery, because I have killed the battery through lack of use. My mileage makes the whole dealership laugh. I am very happy when I am in my car. It just doesn’t happen quite often enough.

After getting the Mini all spruced up and in working order, and catching the Germany v Ghana game while we waited – we left the dealership and headed back to Saratoga Springs, which is a really lovely little town. It is also home to our closest Target, so we had to go there for a truly bizarre shopping list of odds and ends (mascara, whisk, three hole punch….). Then we headed into downtown Saratoga Springs to wander down main street, do some window shopping and then stopped at The Wine Bar, which is a gem of a place. It’s an old brownstone-type building and the inside is really nicely decorated, but they also have  small outdoor sidewalk terrace. And we sat, had some wine, delicious homemade crackers and dip and people-watched to our hearts content. One of the things I love about where we live in Vermont is how quiet it is, how pastoral our views. But once in a while a good, healthy dose of watching other people is necessary. And with a glass of wine in hand on the sidewalk of Saratoga, it was very satisfying.

The very next day we had guests from Australia show up on our doorstep, having been in Cooperstown, NY that day, and headed for Quebec the next, and it just got me thinking again about how well located Shoreham is for that kind of stop. We can give you a little taste of Vermont, a cozy bed, delicious dinner and send you on your way to do some beautiful driving and admiring of our views on your way to or from somewhere else. So next time you might be headed to the horse races in Saratoga Springs, or up to Montreal – we’re a nice little stop in the middle: 1 1/2 hours gets you to Saratoga and about 2 gets you to Montreal.

I am writing this at the end of a perfect Vermont summer day. Bright, clear sunshine. I think the high was about 74 degrees. Little breeze, not much humidity. We’ve got people here on inn-to-inn bicycling trips and I’ve just been thinking about how perfect the bicycling can be in this part of the state. So I thought I’d share the details about a fantastic event that will be happening in September for the third year, Le Tour de Farms. Plenty of time to plan in case you’d like to come participate.

This event is run as a collaborative event supporting Rural Vermont,  The Addison County Relocalization Network (ACoRN) and The Vermont Bicycle and Pedestrian Coalition. The Boston Globe has just named it as one of their chosen events for a fun-filled summer.

More importantly, this event is a whole lot of fun. This year it will be on Sunday September 19th. Basically the idea is to ride your bicycle from farm to farm, sampling local foods along the way. It begins and ends here in Shoreham on our village green. At the start the riders gather on the green, where there are muffins and coffee available. There you also collect your route map, and there are routes of varying lengths, ranging from 10 – 30 miles. The start times are slightly staggered, to try and avoid too many people on the road all at once, and so that first farm doesn’t end up with 500 people there all at the same time. Next, you ride. At your own pace, stop, start, make yourself happy. The routes take you past up to about 20 different stops where you can see working farms of all types in action, sample food and drinks, and take in our gorgeous scenery. The rides all end back here in Shoreham where the Shoreham Apple Fest will be underway. The Apple Fest just began last year, so it is still a work in progress, but it will involve live music, games for kids, massage for riders, crafts and foods for sale.

The event will happen rain or shine, but we can cross our fingers for a day a little like today, where Addison County will show off all its glory and a lot of people will feel proud to live here, or jealous of those of us who do.

As promised, we have done nothing blog-worthy in the past week unless you would be interested in the great refrigerator swap-out of 2010. That was a production. We had an enormous, old, ex-country store display refrigerator here in the Inn, and it drew it’s last breath last week. So it had to be replaced, which means it needed to be removed from the premises. Ah…but we have built a grill room extension on the kitchen since the days when the refrigerator entered the Inn. We came up with several other potential plans that did not involve it having to exit the Inn; turning it into a hot tub, tossing it down the basement stairs and storing fuel in it, taking a chain saw to the front of the Inn and making a quick, new door –  before careful planning, much measuring, removing of several doors, moving a lot of furniture, three guys, two dollys and the 1985 Chevy pickup got involved. It’s out, it was painful, but it’s done.

Sorry, this post is supposed to be about cheese. Because refrigerator maintenance, while a large part of an innkeeper’s life, may not be what you would come to Vermont to see. But, you might want to come check out our cheeses. We have wonderful cheeses. I know I am partial, but Addison County in particular has wonderful cheese. I thought I’d talk about one local producer, so I can talk about others at another time (when perhaps toilet repair has featured heavily in the week’s activities, and you won’t want to hear about that either…) Today we will talk about Twig Farm. It is run by Michael Lee and Emily Sunderman, and they make fantastic goat cheeses. I have to admit, I really was not a huge goat cheese fan, but only when I moved to Vermont and started tasting the local cheeses did I learn that there is much more to goat cheese than chevre, which was all I knew. Twig Farm makes wonderful aged cheeses, blue cheeses, soft, pungent European style cheeses, all from goats milk. The first time they had us over to taste some of their cheeses and meet the goats Dominic and I fell a little bit in love with everything about Twig Farm – the cheeses are delicious, Michael and Emily are intelligent and passionate about what they do, their house and work spaces are wonderful, and they have names for all their goats, who really like to rub the tops of their heads up against your legs, and that is pretty darn cute. For a while Dominic tried to convince me we could use a goat for a pet. (Two goats actually – you have to get goats in pairs, they make friends for life and if they are separated from their first friend, they become loner goats. Very sad.)

Vermont cheese has become increasingly popular over the time we have lived here, and if you are interested in sampling locally, the fantastic Middlebury Farmer’s Market is a great place to pick up cheeses and meet and talk to the producers. If you are here when the Farmer’s Market is not in session, the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op also has a very wide selection. Another idea would be to sign up for a Vermont Farm Tour, some of which focus exclusively on cheesemakers. And finally there is a great map put out by the Vermont Cheese Council, called the Cheese Trail Map, which details all of the cheesemakers in the state and gives locations and hours of operation for those farms that do open themselves up to the public.

I have been thinking that one way to highlight things to do in this area would be to tell you what we get up to on our days off. And then I thought, hmm, I’m not sure that provides enough material for an ongoing series, unless you are interested in going to the bank, the grocery store and picking up cheese. Well, you might be interested in the cheese part, so we’ll leave that for another post.

But, this week we had a doozy of a day out and I thought I’d share the details. First of all, please note that it was 94 degrees yesterday. May 25. Vermont. Yes, I said 94 degrees. Currently I am awaiting the promised thunderstorm, but see nothing on the horizon. And it’s still 94 degrees today. Back to yesterday. First we ran errands, because people who are innkeepers AND live in a rural setting rarely go anywhere without cramming in a few things from their to-do list. Then we found ourselves in Rutland, VT and on the advice of a friend, went to Gill’s Deli. There we ordered  a ‘Hot Italian with the works’ as instructed. They do four sizes of sandwich: mini, small, large and giant. I will advise you that everyone who was ordering just for themselves was ordering a mini. The minis were more than I could eat. We got a large to share. This came in handy after our next activity.

We left the deli and drove to Killington to do the Pico Peak Trail hike. This is about a 6 mile round trip, up to the top of Pico Peak. It was gorgeous and cooler that you’d imagine, being shaded and in the mountains. (Though, remember, it was still 94 degrees outside) We saw no one except one pretty little snake and a frog. It was hard work – it’s a moderate hike, with some pretty steep areas to it. But the views were so worth it. It’s funny to be hiking across a ski area and picturing all the snow and swooshing skiers only a couple of months ago. At the top we sat on the deck of the ski hut and had our well deserved large sandwich, and had no trouble finishing it.

And then to cap the day, we stopped in Brandon, VT on the way home and got an ice cream cone (I had been angling for a creemee since about halfway down the hike, that large sandwich quickly forgotten) at The Inside Scoop, which may be the best ice cream/old-fashioned candy store/soda fountain on the planet. I resisted all the penny candy and had a sugar cone (when was the last time you had a sugar cone?) of Wilcox’s mint chocolate chip, which was completely satisfying.

We may not get many of these kind of days, but we love them when we do. And I’ve got lots more ideas so if you come to visit, I just might share them.

I thought I’d write a little post about some things to do in our neck of the woods. We are now entering the time of year when people naturally think of visiting our piece of Vermont. Which also means that we are entering the time of year when we innkeepers don’t get out and do any of the things the visitors come and see, we’re too busy tending the home fires, making beds and preparing food for their return. But, in stolen moments and certainly vicariously through their stories and experiences, we do see all the wonder that is Vermont in the summer.

One of our favorite things to do when we have a few hours off and want to get away from home is to get in the car and explore side roads, usually in search of lakes or ponds to dip into. Some of the lakes we’ve found, I’m not sure I could find again, or maybe I don’t really want to share all my secrets… But it is no secret that one of the most spectacular lakes near Shoreham isn’t actually in Vermont, it is Lake George in New York. Well, the secret may be how easy and close Lake George actually is to Shoreham. Using the Fort Ticonderoga Ferry, located 5 miles from the Inn here in Shoreham, it’s a seven minute cable ferry ride over to the town of Ticonderoga. And the very northern tip of Lake George is in Ticonderoga. It’s a long, gorgeous lake and the drive alongside it is wonderful. Last time we did it, I realized it’s the tall, tall green trees that make it feel like a different world from Vermont with it’s rolling, low green. You feel enclosed by green and it smells earthy and piney and wonderful. Yes, I realize that the town of Lake George itself (way down on the other end of the lake, 30 miles from the Ticonderoga end) has a reputation for lots of honky tonky arcades and masses of people, but you don’t have to go there unless you want to. Bolton Landing has some smaller shops and restaurants right on the lake, and there are public access points and camping locations at various points along the shore. I haven’t even mentioned Fort Ticonderoga itself, but maybe I’ll save that for another post about historic sites to explore.