Our Story

Travel-Vermont.net is about passion. 
The passion of telling stories about places we love.
It all started with that simple idea.
For a number of years while living in Montreal, Quebec, I had been visiting Vermont. Then I finally moved to Vermont early in 2007, to live with my future husband. We had driven up and down its hills, had enjoyed its scenery, camped along beautiful lakeshores, experienced its local factories. I thought I had seen it all.

So nothing had prepared me for what we discovered on a very special summer day of 2007.
   That day, my future husband, our guests and I drove around central Vermont with Gary Lord, a history professor at Norwich. (We had won an historic tour in a silent auction at a New England Culinary Institute fund-raising event).
  That day, we discovered that Vermont had a lot more to offer than the traditional tourist spots… Ben & Jerry’s… the Cabot Cheese factory… all great things to do to have a good time here, but there was more..!
    That day, we discovered some of Vermont hidden treasures: quaint little villages organized around their Commons, just like they were in the 19th century, with their church, their school, their meeting places; old homes from the times of the first settlers; typical country stores; old cemeteries; and of course typical covered bridges and a remarkable floating bridge.
    That day, we learned to understand how people in Vermont lived for the past two and three hundred years: from raising sheep to raising cows; from the hills to the valleys with the development of the railroad; from its first settlers to the immigrants from Italy and Quebec, and much more.
That day, we realized that there are not many places in the USA where you can still see the villages just the way they were more than a century ago, with their original organization and architecture.

But that summer day brought us even more: our group then visited the Vermont State House, with David Schütz, the curator of the State of Vermont, as our guide. The State House is such a beautiful majestic building. It is great to simply walk in, wander in the Chambers, sit in the very seat in which senators and congressmen vote the laws of the State. There are not too many State Houses where you can still do this! And it was wonderful to hear David tell the story of those stained glass skylights (see photo) which ornate the ceiling of the Battle of Cedar Creek room: he had discovered them a few years ago, in thousands of broken pieces in the attic, and patiently – over five years – restoration experts had put them back together, piece by piece… Quite a restoration story, indeed.

And after this wonderful summer day… Well… we went to China for seven months. And there, we traveled through a few Asian countries, and I read and wrote… wrote short stories about the places, the people, the cultural symbols, the history… in a blog named “My Adventure in China” . I got great ratings for it, from people like blogged.com or blogcatalog.com… And simply loved the writing!

And that’s the way the idea of Travel-Vermont.net was born!
The idea of writing stories every week, talking about the wonderful places to discover in Vermont, in English and in French.
Travel-Vermont.net is about sharing stories with passion.

So, that is the beginning of our story… We hope you will all enjoy it!

Christine Sawyer
Founder of Travel-Vermont.net
PS: oh, by the way, that very special summer day of 2007… was our wedding day!!