A New Award and an Old Town

First of all, I have received this award from Sandra at Nora Lee's Nook. Here's what she said about me: "Hope at Second Time Around where it is always fun to stop by and see what she is up to, and also for some laughs!" I am so glad that I can bring a smile to the ones who visit here. As I told Sandra, laughter is good medicine, and I'm a firm believer in laughter! If you haven't visited her at Nora Lee's Nook, you must run on over there and check it out. Sandra has many old items which she shares passed down through generations of her family. She's also a girl after my own heart who loves junkin' and she also shares many of her great finds!! Thanks you so much, Sandra, for this honor. When you drop in on her, tell her Hope sent you! :)

Next, an old town! This past summer DH fulfilled one of my dreams by taking me on a trip from VA to Maine. It was a long, tiring trip but we saw so many interesting places along the way, as you can imagine. There's no way I could get all this into one post so I'll break it down so that you don't get "picture overload"! As I mentioned in one of the meme's I did a while back, I love the movie Baby Boom with Diane Keaton, about a devoted career woman who "inherits" a baby and leaves her city life for the country. The name of the area in the movie was Hadleyville, Vermont, but in real life, it is a very small town called Peru, Vermont. This little town consists of a town center:



an old cemetary behind the towncenter:



a post office:



a beautiful, old church:



and my favorite place, the old general store:



In the movie, Keaton's character buys a farm, sight unseen, complete with a beautiful old farmhouse and an apple orchard. With so many apples laying around going to waste, she decides to make baby food apple sauce for her newly inherited baby.
Being a sharp business woman, she also decides to try and sell some of this baby food so she takes some to the local general store. Tourists drift through this small town from a much larger, neighboring town which is a resort area. (We actually stayed in the resort town for one night. Very expensive place but nice.) This little store is the actual one from the movie.



It took me back in time for a while. The lady who now owns the store was very friendly and told us all about the excitement that went on during the making of the movie. I was amazed at all the goodies sold in this one small place. Fresh muffins and coffee in the morning, cheeses, pizza and of course, Vermont Maple Syrup. It even had the old wood stove still used for heat where the old men use to sit around, swapping stores and spitting tobacco juice in the spittoon!



Notice the original old wood floor around the stove. The original wood counters are still in use too, along with the old cash register. (Oh yeah, they also sell night crawlers and worms!)





A sign is still displayed over a doorway showing the original owner.




When Keaton's character was driving to her new home in the film, this is the beautiful tree-lined road she was on:



The store owner told us that the house used in the film was just a few miles down the road but was too far back to be seen from the road. We left this town by way of the tree-lined road on to our next destination. I was amazed at all the dirt roads in this area which are main routes! We use to have a lot of these in our county that have now been paved.

I hope you've enjoyed your little tour today. I want to show more of the places we visited at a later date. I also hope my pictures aren't chopped up a lot. The only thing I could do was resize them but then when I loaded them to Flickr they were bigger. :( The only other way I could find to change my template and make it wider was with HTML and I know nothing about that! Oh well, maybe sooner or later a more computer literate person will be able to help me!