For a state that's within driving range, you'd think I'd have overnighted in Vermont before last weekend. Well, I hadn't.

Now I have.

The wife and I headed up to Burlington to take in the sights, but mostly for the second game of what turned out to be a reasonably unsatisfying two game set between the Icedogs and UVM (both ties). Drove up Friday after work missing BU's steal of a point (tying goal scored with less than a minute to go) as well as any scenery offered by the drive (of which there is some, if my memories of a 1995 trip to a BU-UVM game are anything to go by).

Not surprising for February, it was cold and snowy during our visit. Our plans for Saturday were pretty well truncated by seasonal closures, but we did spend a little time at ECHO. It's really more set up for kids, but it was an OK way to kill some time, even if I did turn my ankle on some ice in the parking lot.

We went up to Church Street (a shopping area restricted to foot traffic, kind of like a smaller version of Boston's Downtown Crossing) to have lunch at the NECI Commons and look around. Turns out that the folks who run the New England Culinary Institute have decided to consolidate, as the Commons is now closed. You want NECI-made food, you have to trundle over to The Inn at Essex. So by the time we found a new place for lunch (OK, we went to a place that was across the street, but we waited a bit for a table), we were well behind out schedule to tour the Magic Hat brewery (located about a quarter mile from where we stayed).

That might have been for the best, as Magic Hat was sponsoring a Mardi Gras parade in downtown Burlington. I'm not a huge parade person, and when you factor in snow and temperatures in the teens, I'm even less interested. The wife concurred, so we instead bought some locally-made foodstuffs for dinner and went back to the hotel to rest and watch CBC coverage of the Olympics.

We left for the game at about 6:30. We should have left at 6. Traffic to Gutterson is awful, the product of some sort of crack-addled transportation engineer. The snow didn't help, as Vermonters don't seem to want to plow until the snow stops (as it was, I think we saw all of one plow before leaving on Sunday morning, when we saw 3 or 4). So we missed the first five minutes or so of the game, which included the first BU goal. The rest of the game was OK, I suppose a tie is better than a loss. Gutterson is a pretty good place to see a game, much more like the older rinks in Hockey East that are now largely gone (save for Alfond Arena, where Maine plays).

We went back to the hotel and crashed after the game. Sunday was the drive home, which I had to pass off to the wife pretty early on given that the ankle I'd turned the day before wasn't interested in continuing to depress pedals. We made one stop to have lunch (eating at the same place we had dinner on Friday, unintentionally), and were home by mid-afternoon.

A decent trip, but I think we'd like to go up when there's no snow and things are actually open.