I’ve seen rain, and I’ve seen rain

But the thing is, with a $400 tent, it just doesn’t matter.

So, here’s the deal on the week in Burlington. For starters, the town is cool. One of the biggest small towns I’ve seen. The trustafundians are a bit oppressive, and it is possible to get tired of being confronted by pierced body parts everywhere you turn, but the city’s as bike-friendly as they say it is, and , well, let’s just put it this way: you’d probably assume that someone called “Speeder” knows something about caffeine, and you’d be right.

What did we do? Camped along the bike path and took full advantage of it, although, owing to extreme allergies, I never really got a seriously long, hard bike ride in. We went south and we went north, we took the bike ferry and rode on the causeway, we sat at Auer’s Boat House and enjoyed cold candy bars and Gatorade. We had lunch and dinner on the waterfront. We went to cheer on our team at a baseball game in an old concrete stadium, and saw the best Tri-City Valleycats game we’ve seen (and, oddly, we weren’t the only Tri-City fans there, either). We went to the wonderful ECHO center, a kind of discovery center for Lake Champlain. We went to a rock climbing gym and had a blast. We blew a bazillion dollars at the bike store. We toured the Ben & Jerry’s factory and the Lake Champlain Chocolates factory. In the same day! We went swimming nearly every day. We took showers every chance we got, because it was really really hot and really really humid. We hunkered down in our tent every night because it poured, but we were cool with it because we had our rain gear. It was all very nice. Second time we’ve spent a week there, and I’d happily do it again. On the way home, we took the ferry back to New York and made a little diversion to Fort Ticonderoga. I hadn’t been there since I was in elementary school. It hasn’t changed much, but it was well worth the side trip. Plus, it gave me the chance to explain to the girls that when Hannah was a baby, we used to tie together upside-down laundry baskets to keep her in the living room, and we called it Fort Tyke-on-da-rug-ga. This was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

So, the allergies. On the oppressive side. But even worse, I’ve had to go 72 hours without any drugs at all so I can prepare for a massive pricking tomorrow morning. I’m living the life.