Top 6 Favorites of Church Street

In my last post I listed my 4 favorite places in Burlington. Church Street was one of them. Church Street itself is full of shops and restaurants.  This is a list of my favorite parts of Church Street.

*Restaurants aren't included...they'll be covered in my next post.*

1. Burlington Town Center 
The Burlington Town Center is the mall in downtown Burlington. It has many entrances, one located on Church Street. It has many popular retailers such as Gap, American Eagle, and, my personal obsession, Ann Taylor Loft. Other shops such as Urban Outfitters and Banana Republic are located directly on Church Street.

2. Tradewinds
One of my favorite stores to wander around is Tradewinds. They have jewelry from all over the world as well as wood carvings and metal figures. Basically there's just a lot of really cool stuff to look at. And it smells nice as well.



3. Ben & Jerry's
I am a massive fan of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. I actually had to keep a count of the number of pints I ate last semester to slow myself down. (9, by the way. I ate 9 pints. Gross. But delicious.) The scoop shop is a spot I frequent regularly. I tend to lean toward getting Chocolate Therapy since it's Scoop Shop Only meaning it can't be bought as a pint. So sad. So yummy. I also really like the Berry Berry Extraordinary Sorbet. Also, while we're on the topic of Ben & Jerry's, the factory in Waterbury offers tours. Check those out on the weekends...it's only a few exits down from SMC.

4. Zinnia
Like Tradewinds I love wandering around Zinnia. They have really nice jewelry with a prices ranging from very reasonable to fairly expensive.

5. Lake Champlain Chocolates
Lake Champlain Chocolates is a Vermont company whose factory is located on Pine Street in Burlington (like B&J there are factory tours offered.) They make all kinds of different chocolates and hot chocolate. Yum.

6. Street Acts
One of the cool parts of Church Street is that it's full of street performers. On nice days it's fun to sit on a bench and listen to a guitar/violin duet or watch this guy to the left do his act. He's hilarious and around all the time.

A Week of Ben & Jerry's in Burlington

First of all, sorry for the weird layout of this post. I was really struggs with the pictures. Anyway...last week was absolutely fabulous. For the first time EVER at SMC I had no homework all week. Incredible. In addition to doing absolutely nothing every night I had some fun activities to keep me busy. In hindsight I now realize that they all involved Ben & Jerry's ice cream in some way. Yikes. I'll write this blog post and then do some crunches to counteract all of the delicious fatty ice cream I've eaten in the last week.

Fun Activity 1: Free Cone Day

Every year B&J have a Free Cone Day across the world where you literally just walk into the shop, ask them for any flavor, and leave with free ice cream. If you've never heard of this you are truly missing out. This year FCD was last Tuesday. Dachelle and i made our way into Burlington, stood in a ridiculously long line, came out of B&J two very happy girls with one Chocolate Therapy and one Clusterfluff. We then made our way down to the Waterfront, sat on a swing, and stared out at the water on a beautiful spring day. Glorious.

Incredible day on the Waterfront.

Fun Activity 2: Big Purple in B-Town

Happiness.

Since ski season has ended it's been quite sad not to see my Big Purple girls every single day. For this reason we planned a Friday afternoon adventure to Burlington. We bee-lined for B&J where I then got yet another Chocolate Therapy ice cream and was quite happy with life. We then wandered Church Street and ran into the lovely Leanna from the XC team who took a fabulous group pic.

Love.

Fun Activity 3: Earth Day

Every year there's an Earth Week on Campus. Events include Meatless Monday, a Green Career Fair, and a Local Food Night in Alliot. Sunday was the kick off in Ross. We had Barefoot Truth back playing, which was good once again. In addition we had free Ben & Jerry's ice cream (seeing the trend yet?), delicious burgers (meat and veggie) from a local farm, and bike powered smoothies, among many other things. It was a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Barefoot Truth
Picture by Andi Nelson, my fabulous XC teammate

It was a wonderful week full of delicious ice cream. I should probably take a step back and rethink my diet choices while I'm not really running at all, but it was COMPLETELY worth it.

Catmount

First of all, please excuse my post name. I was trying to come up with something more creative, but I'm cutting into my nap time and that's just not ok. Now that we're two weeks into school it feels like we've been here forever. It's no longer syllabus week and I actually have a full workload. I've been working every night since Wednesday on an excessively long Prob/Stats homework assignment. Thus the desperate need for a nap. Tonight will be no exception now that he's extended the due date to Wednesday (THANK YOU!!!). It's going to be a busy week.

As usual, the weekend flew by. I wish it wouldn't do that. It was pretty relaxed, though, since our race was on Sunday. Friday and Saturday nights were all about watching movies and eating Ben & Jerry's. (A Knights Tale and Hercules, Neapolitan Dynamite and S'Mores...in case you were wondering) Saturday was an absolutely GORGEOUS day and I got to spend a good chunk of it on Church Street with my family. It was my dad's birthday and my brother came home for the weekend, so we all went out to lunch at The Three Tomatoes. Always delicious.

A view of Church St. from in front of Borders on Saturday

Sunday was the first race of the XC season. It was at Catamount, which is where we run our intervals on Tuesdays. We were the only Division II school out of the four teams there, so it was kind of more like a team time trial than a real race against the other teams (UVM, Columbia, and a team from Tennessee that I cannot for the life of me remember the name of). I'm not at all a fan of the course, which for the first two miles is mostly in a field loop that we repeated after running smaller bits and pieces of other sections. The best part of the whole thing is the third mile, which is mostly uphill for the first half and all down for the second. But at least it did something other than looping around that field.

I felt good at first, running a good first mile split, but somewhere between being excited because thought I felt great and could hold the pace and the end of the race where I felt slightly like death, I slowed down. A lot. In the end I wasn't all too excited about my race, but I have to keep reminding myself that I've only been running for two weeks. But still. Yuck. Hopefully Middlebury on Saturday will be better.

I have a bunch of pictures from yesterday since a couple of the girls weren't able to race and one of them borrowed my camera. Check out the slide show for some SMC XC action!