Summer Heat

This summer, Cally's Grandma and Bumpa decided to do something different. They rented a camp on Lake Champlain for two weeks instead of heading out to Cape Cod. Folks were ready to try a lake and John and I promised to have an abundance of babysitters and reservations at good restaurants for everyone to enjoy.

The location really was amazing:

Beautiful views of the Adirondacks, refreshing lake temperatures, plenty of space for all, and for the first week lovely breezes.

John, Cally and I decided to move over to the lake for the entire two weeks. While it was lovely to be in a place that felt so far away, but still only be 45 minutes from home, his proved to be a logistical nightmare. We weren't on the ball about packing because we knew we could come home if we forgot something, so we kept making lists of more stuff to bring the next time one of us swung by the house. That said, because I only had to work one day while we were there, I felt very far away and in a very different world from the foothills of Jericho where we live.

During the first week we took Grandma and Bumpa up for a field trip to Montreal. Aside from being held up at the Canadian border for 1/2 hour on the way up because we forgot any sort of identification for Cally, we had a lovely afternoon. We ate a delicious lunch of crepes and strolled along the river:




The weather the first week was chilly. I read a book for the first time since X-mas vacation and we all did a lot of relaxing. Some days didn't get above 65 degrees- as you can see from the fleece and jeans attire that Grandma and Cally are wearing below:


Things changed on the weekend of July 3rd........... We managed to catch the Bristol parade on Saturday morning before it got too hot. Cally saw lots of tractors and horses:

And, she even got to catch her first pony ride. She hasn't been able to stop talking about cookie the pony since....


Though it got warm that day, the evening cooled down and I think I recall wearing a long sleeve shirt and pants while watching Burlington's fireworks from our friends Jeff and Jules' boat:

By Tuesday, which was Cally's cousin Will's first birthday, things started to get unbearable. The wind stopped, the camp absorbed heat, the lake developed algae blooms, and the fans around the house just couldn't seem to get the temperature below 90 degrees.

Fortunately, for Will and good planning by his parents, we had a late morning birthday party. So, things didn't get too hot until later.......


Cally was pretty happy to be having her second cupcake ever:


By Wednesday, we were running out of cheerfulness and places that were tolerable to sleep at the camp. We managed to get some reprieve by going out to air conditioned places for dinner, but our poor babysitters deserved hazardous duty pay for staying in the house during he worst part of the day.

In the end, Bumpa decided to pull the plug on the Forced Family Outing (FFO). Everyone had put up a pretty good front, but no one was really having that much fun anymore. And so, we all decided to pack up early and head in different directions. Uncle James, Aunt Paula, Kesley and Jameson headed back to Duxbury, MA where they had central air conditioning and ocean breezes. John headed into the Adirondacks for what one of his students called a "bikram backpacking" trip, and the rest of us went to Stowe for a night at Uncle James and Aunt Paula's place where at least the bedrooms had a.c.

You win some and you lose some. As Bumpa said, "this was like getting rain on a ski vacation". I think it was way worse than that........ maybe that's because I can deal with cold and I can deal with rain, but I moved to Vermont to NOT have to deal with days and days of heat. In any case, it was a real treat to get Cally and her cousins on the Meyer side together for the first time since Will was born. We were lucky to be able to do that.

Alas, it poured last night and the temperatures have been hanging out in the 70's today. It's still muggy and buggy, but I'll take this over the heat any day. Actually, I'll take below zero temperatures for a month before another heat wave like this again!