Sometimes travel isn’t about seeing everything. About filling up itineraries and running from place to place until you need a vacation from your vacation.
Sometimes it’s just about slowing down. About letting a place passively become a part of your life, even if it’s just for a few days.
I spent the last weekend in Sharon, Vermont where the pace of life is already on the slower side and sightseeing wouldn’t take too that long anyway.
Instead of a hotel, we stayed in a home on a hill (a very large, MTV Cribs kind of home if anyone on MTV Cribs would have ever lived in remote Vermont) with a kitchen, a vegetable and flower garden and enough bedrooms with perfectly puffy down comforters to sleep nine girls. I’ve found that staying in big homes can mean more togetherness since your group isn’t divided up in separate rooms on separate floors, and there are usually prime common areas for spending time together. And if you’ve got a big enough group, they can be pretty cost effective too. They also give you a better feel for living like a local, which a hotel most definitely cannot do.
The trip wasn’t as much about Vermont as it was about spending quality time together, but we ended up absorbing more of real Vermont than we might have had there been an itinerary to stick to.
Instead of eating at restaurants, we bought groceries from a supermarket where organic doesn’t have its own section because the eggs came from the farm up the road, where you can fill your own jar of local honey from a big tin tub and where the two cashiers know their patrons by name. We picked fresh tomatoes from the garden for our salads, plucked basil for the pasta and doused our French toast in Vermont maple syrup (which is so good, the state happens to be known for it).
Instead of running around trying to do this and see that, we soaked in the sun poolside, drank cocktails on blankets in the grass and sat to watch the sun fall behind the hills.
The time was the quality kind we were after, and the taste of Vermont was understated but there nonetheless. I may not have left knowing the history of Sharon, Vermont or what Joseph Smith’s birthplace marker looks like, but I know a little about how the town’s locals live, what they eat and that life is simpler there than many other places I’ve visited.
Most importantly, though, I left with that restored/rejuvenated/refreshed feeling that travel is supposed to give you when you’re not too busy chasing a tour bus or checking off spots the guide book suggested.
Travel shouldn’t always be a chase, but about slowing down to feel a place rather than just see it.
Visit Crush Global Travel to learn more about this Vermont property.