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Vermont is a really strange place.

You can carry a concealed firearm without a permit.

Legal age for carrying a firearm, longarm or sidearm, concealed or open, unaccompanied by an adult, is 16.

They have the best homeschool law in the country, where you can opt out of submitting to state curricula review and testing on religious grounds.

Other than that, their politics are WHACKED!

We live just a few miles from Brattleboro, on the NH side of the Connecticut River.

They recently had to pass a law in Brattleboro to prohibit public nudity. They had tolerated it for years, but it was beginning to have an adverse affect on tourism.

There used to be one guy walking around with a sandwich-board sign that said, “Ashamed of George Bush”

Brattleboro is CRAWLING with the looniest, whackiest, hippie wannabes and aging hippies.

I would venture there are more unclean, rope-haired dopers per-capita than in any major city.

The next town north, Putney, is almost normal. A very different world.

There is a nuclear reactor just south of Brattleboro, in Vernon.

Maybe there are emanations that are affecting their thinking.

Time for some extra tinfoil.

I sure don’t want to catch whatever it is they’ve got.

You nailed it. I've always said that Vermont is a paradox. We used to come down from the camp in Jamaica to Mass at St Michael's on Sundays and the little girls would be wearing their communion dresses to church services ... I always thought that was odd as a kid, but my mother explained to me that the working class people there were practical and made good use of the garments. Yankee thrift.

No hunting trip was ever complete without a stop at Sam's for free coffee at 4AM ... I loved being among the men in their red and black checkered wool shirts and red suspenders with pistols on their hips. Then came the hippes .... Brattleboro has been infested with them since the 60s. Anywhere two hours from Boston has been, Nashua NH area included. Dad was infatuated with Vermont ... the abundant game, the beautiful mountains, playing checkers around the pot belly stove of Muzzy's general store swapping hunting stories. He told tales of going up Rt 30 and using boards to drive over the washed out roads to get to the camp.

I saw the ski areas flourish with consortiums of investors, the chalets and now condos/time shares. There are still folks who are deeply conservative in the backwoods, but they are vastly outnumbered now, by the Ben and Jerry's crowd.

Last fall I took a nostalgic drive on the dirt road Albany Turnpike from Jamaica to Manchester, past the site of Daniel Webster's famous Whig speech supporting "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" on the backside of Stratton Mountain ... 15,000 delegates who traveled by stagecoach, horseback and on foot to hear a political speech. Come on 15,000 people in the middle of no-where!

I'll always love Vermont in spite of the fact that Kerry beat Bush there in '04. And in spite of their now whacked-out bent. ;)

If you live on the other side, then you know the best example of what the environmentalist’s vision of the US will entail. It never ceases to astonish me every time I cross I-89 from VT into NH, across the river. On the NH side, literally miles of retail and commercial property. On the VT side, nothing. I mean literally nothing. Pristine poverty.
Do you know the White River Junction area?