The owner of the three clothing companies once owned by Vermont Teddy Bear is closing its Shelburne distribution center, putting 29 people out of work by June 5. But the stuffed-toy maker is staying put at its Shelburne location, officials emphasized on Wednesday. “We’re still here,” Katie Langrock, senior vice president of operations for Vermont…
Peering over the handlebars of my mountain bike, I checked out rock work and wooden bridges while climbing the Tourbillon trail through dense Québécois forest. The name translates to “eddy,” which fits: It crosses the creek it follows over and over. Mist swallowed me, but just for a moment, as I pedaled through a dip,…
Like Vermonters, the people of Québec know how to seize the summer. But with 14 times our population, the province hosts more events, concerts and festivals than it is humanly possible to attend. Many of them are uniquely enticing. In multicultural Montréal, it might be a Japanese street food festival or a three-day African dance…
Stand on the summit of Gros-Cacouna mountain, in the coastal Gaspé Peninsula community of Cacouna, and you can gaze for miles across the St. Lawrence Estuary. Its brackish waters rise and recede, tugged by faraway North Atlantic tides. For bigger animals, including whales, it presents a natural buffet: The nutrient-rich confluence of cold seawater with…
I’m a lazy traveler. When planning where to eat in a new destination, I’d much rather send an SOS email to an in-the-know friend than do my own research. In Québec City, that friend is Rémy Charest, a lifelong resident who has been writing about food and wine for nearly 30 years. Though it offers…
It’s not precisely true that no one goes to Anticosti Island, the windswept and shipwreck-ringed shard of land that sits where the St. Lawrence River meets the sea. There are the island’s 200-odd year-round residents, for starters. Hunters travel there each fall in hopes of bagging the abundant white-tailed deer that browse its boreal forests;…
Montréal had a gloomy outlook when I was growing up there in the 1990s. An economic recession, political uncertainty around separation from Canada, and a brain drain of young Anglos and immigrants (including me) to Toronto and the U.S. made urban decline seem certain. A lot of big, vacant, derelict buildings came to define Griffintown…
Each time I drive to Montréal, I watch for the big block letters of my favorite sign. When I spot “FARINE FIVE ROSES,” glowing in midcentury red atop a former flour mill on the riverfront, I know I’m nearly downtown. I’m drawn to the sign’s factory-chic hulk, its faded charisma, and that mashup of French…
The anticipation at ObservÉtoiles, an outdoor observatory in the Eastern Townships, had been building for hours. Or was it days? I’d traveled there, along with my husband and 10-year-old son, to watch April’s solar eclipse at the astronomy-themed spot, which found itself — through a stroke of cosmic luck — squarely within the path of…
Lifting off from Burlington International Airport has a lot to recommend it: proximity, a solid book exchange, preflight pints at the Skinny Pancake. Anecdotes suggest good odds, moreover, of spotting at least one member of Phish (or, at the very least, of Vermont’s congressional delegation). There are rocking chairs; it’s cute as a button. But…
