Vermont Brewers Festival

This past Friday Chris, Riley and I left on a little family vacation to Burlington, VT for their annual beer festival. We ordered tickets last month for the Saturday "family friendly" session and left around 10am Friday morning. Once we arrived we walked around Burlington for awhile and had a late lunch. There were several huge thunderstorms in the area Friday though so unfortunately the walking around was rather limited.

Saturday morning we got ready and checked out of our (crummy) hotel and drove to the waterfront where the festival was. Fortunately there is plenty of reasonably priced parking in Burlington so finding a place to park was not something to stress about. Before we left the hotel we did check the weather and dressed for the low 80s weather.com quoted. Well, add about 10 degrees to that and you get what the weather actually was. Chris really enjoyed going around to all of the little beer booths and trying different types of beer. With his ticket he got a little glass and 10 tickets for beer. He bought a few extra tickets as well since a few beers cost more than one ticket. Some of the lines were ridiculously long but once you got to the front you were rewarded with a 3oz sample of beer. (Though sometimes it was more like 4oz.) The sun was hot and glaring though and even though both Riley and I were wearing spf 50 we got a little burned. The food was good too and not terribly expensive. I had a designated driver ticket and got free bottles of water and soda all day. This was a great deal since the DD ticket was only $5 and to buy water was $2-4 depending on where you went. Lots of people brought chairs and sun tents and set up on the lawn by the water and made a day out of it. Overall we had a really nice time the only downside being how hot it was.

As you can see on the right side of the page some of my dahlias are coming along nicely. I do have a problem with aphids though and those little buggers have been sucking the life out of my leaves and stunting the growth of the plant. I hope today to spray them with an insecticide and take care of the problem. I would like to do something a little less drastic first but there are just so many of them I think I would ultimately have to use the insecticide anyway. Hopefully the really stunted plants still have time to grow and bloom before the frost as it takes 90 or so days (supposedly) from planting to bloom.