Burlington! Small town or bustling indie music city? Answer: both.

But first, as promised, some beautiful mountainous territory of Vermont.

Now that’s out of the way.

We had a crazy adventure getting there. It took a bit longer than expected to get to Burlington from Buffalo. Then the carputer malfunctioned (cf. the previous post) and the GPS no longer worked. I followed my nose, trusting my instincts. Which were wrong (both the nose and the instincts). We ended up having to drive all the way around Lake Champlain (which is big), and on the way, we were apprehended by the border patrol (yes, we almost went to Canada again). By this point we were already quite late to our host (ETA originally 1:00am; ETA post-“detour”: 2:00am), and the officer had to do a bunch of paperwork and phone calls because of JH’s non-US-citizen-ness.

Finally we were rid of the border guard and we met our hosts, a fun girl named Ali and her happening bf Will Metivier.

“I wish you would stop using ‘happening’ to describe people,” sighs Attractive Girl.

Um… why?

“Events happen; people don’t.”

Dude — people definitely happen. Will was unquestionably happening. I sometimes happen too.

“sigh”

The following day Will showed me around Burlington. That weekend happened to be the Festival of Fools, an outdoor city festival for street performers. We spent some time wandering around, eating, and watching various performances. Unfortunately I forgot my camera but I did snag a few phone pictures.

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I saw jugglers, crazy variety sideshow men, plenty of musicians, and even a guy playing The Majestic Bellowphone, which was evidently some amazing handmade musicial machine, with tubes and horns and whistles and bellowses. One of those one-man-band machines. It was awesome and I was sad my recording equipment was not more portable.

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Unfortunately I forgot to get an official picture of our hosts, so all you have are the above bad shots of Will.

Speaking of Will, he is also a guitarist, and recorded some guitar for me.

“What about all the contacts I gave you in Chicago?” asks Taylor Brennan.

Sadly all of those people either didn’t respond, or they were ocupado. Which is Spanish for occupied. They were occupied in Spanish!

NEXT: Interest!

P.S. All who think “People Happen” would make a good bumper sticker, please say “Aye.”