Goodbye USA

Our last full day in the USA. Montreal here we come. We stayed at the lovely Bel-Aire Motel, not as classy as the Palmer Motel in Manchester Center but comfortable.

(Yes, that's a queen-size bed.) And it was only a three-minute walk to the surf-style breakfast called The Spot in an old gas station. Again real maple syrup!

Today's plan is to take local transit since we returned our car. Online it says the fare is $3.50. If we purchased a Presto Pass it would be $2.75, but we're not here long enough to make it worthwhile. Once at the bus stop we see the fare is $1.25, getting better all the time. The bus driver asks if we are seniors, yes, now it is 60 cents! But wait, our first time on the bus? Yes, okay no charge. Nice eh?

We rode the bus south to the Shelburne Museum. It is one of the nation's most diverse museums of folk art, design, and Americana. There are over 100,000 works exhibited in 38 buildings on 45 acres. A lot to see! Electra Havemeyer Webb started collecting pieces, especially folk art when she was 17. 

This round barn is 80 feet in diameter and was built in 1901, and are supposed to be more efficient in handling feed and hay, and the manure the cows produce. Guess who built the first round barn? The Shakers in 1826. Inside the barn there were displays of horse-drawn coaches.

This is a Surrey with the fringe on top.

Many buildings at the museum had unbelievable collections: dolls, wine glasses, toys, old general store items, glassware, pottery, old presse ... But above are razors for shaving. There were at least three times this many, collected by a New England judge. But even more interesting were the trivets. Willam Paley from Ontario had 2,000 trivets. When he died he left them all to the museum. 

And more...

More trivets

This is the largest collection in the world. Collecting postcards doesn't seem so bad.

The quilt display was remarkable. Dominique Ehrmann from Quebec starting quilting just 11 years ago. This one above is 3 dimensional and is wild! What a piece of art.

Another one of Dominique's.

Above is a quilt from the 1800s.

Last ime we were at the Shelburne Museum there was a display of rug hooking. One woman had hooked  a rug for every state and they were massive in size. This time only a few historiical rugs were there but we saw this stair runner in one of the homes. Inspiring me to do more rug hooking.

The Ticonderoga is a 220-foot paddle wheeler that used to travel up and down Lake Champlain until the early 1950s. Eventually with cars on the scene, the Ti (as the tour guide called her) was not in demand. In 1956 the Shelburne Museum bought the Ti and her moved to its present location. It took 65 days through the winter to get her here, dragged up the hillside from Lake Champlain The tour guide (who loved giving tours, and used to work as a sailor herself) told us more than you might want to know about the Ticonderoga. We learned about pistons, pilots, firemen who shovelled coal, the crankshaft, paddle wheels, the dining room, the captain's quarters, the engineer, bells, whistles... You got the idea. She was a great source of information. 

Norman needed a rest on these lips after that.

The last two exhibits we wanted to see were the Circus posters and Grandma Moses art show. We were not allowed photos. The photo below I took from a booklet I found outside the show. 

The Papering the Town: Circus Posters in America displayed the advertising posters that were the mass media of the day. Most of these posters were plastered on barn and house walls. The majority of this exhibit came from the exterior of a house in Colchester, Vermont. With great care the posters were removed often some up to 20 layers thick.

The second exhibit of Grandma Moses showed her folk art paintings of mostly mid-century American culture. Her work is a lot like Maud Lewis of Nova Scotia. (We like Maud better)

 

To finish off the perfect USA holiday we had pizza, wood-fired Naples style in Burlington. it was delicious, almost as good as Pizza Primastrada back in Victoria.