If you love Vermont - The City Baker's Guide to Country Living

Sweet Life in the Kingdom -
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The husband and I have begun the search for where we might like to spend our golden years, or a least take extended stays in quaint New England towns with awesome inns, restaurants, shops (especially bookshops!), easy hiking trails, waterways for kayaking, and the list goes on. Living centrally located in Massachusetts allows us to go venturing in all directions, but one of the more traveled routes lately has been to Vermont, which has a special place in my heart as my great-grandparents had a dairy farm in Stowe.

Lousie Miller has set her novel, The City Baker's Guide to Country Living, in the northeast portion of the state colloquially known as the Kingdom. Olivia Rawlings, award winning, magazine-featured, pastry chef based in Boston has just had her life take one of those turns and instead of facing the fallout she skedaddles up to her best friend Hannah's place to hide out. But she has debts to pay and a living to make and before she knows it Hannah has arranged a job interview for her at the Maple Leaf Inn.

She gets the job and a lot more than she bargains for. Her boss Margaret is exacting and old fashion, the kitchen is not high tech, the living accommodation doesn't have indoor plumbing, and like many little towns everybody wants to know her business. In time she settles in and even falls in love, but once again when her world gets turned around she runs.

There is the old adage about the things you don't like in someone else are most likely the traits that you don't like in yourself. Olivia has a brashness about her, which is clearly her defense mechanism for dealing with life. Her childhood wasn't the easiest and she had to look out for herself so she doesn't want anyone telling her what to do even if they have her best interests at heart. Unfortunately she also learned to run when things got tough.  Eventually Olivia needs to make some hard decisions - what's most important to her? Who's most important to her? And most importantly - can she stop running away?

Now I might not physically run away when things get tough but I certainly find ways to avoid the situations I find myself in. When I was growing up I thought I understood the pathway I should follow. I did a great job doing just that, but then there came a day when I realized that perhaps it was a path that didn't always make me happy so I would strike out on a new path usually without giving it much thought as to whether or not it was the right one. I've been successful on many of these paths even if I wasn't always happy. Now I've discovered that I really want to follow a creative pathway. It's a scary path because I doubt it will make me rich or famous, but what it does is make me happy. In fact, I think it has been the pathway that I've been avoiding taking for so many years. There is the struggle with my perfectionism and my fears, but I think it's worth starting to stick around and do the hard things. SPOILER - Olivia figures this out for herself as well.

If you're looking for great places to visit in Vermont we found the following inns through Select Registry and Distinctive Inns of New England : The Barrows House and sister property The Dorset Inn  and The Grafton Inn