six nights on a dirt road in central vermont
A Dog Friendly Vermont Vacation Package: Six Nights in a Green Mountain Cabin
This is the shortest trip we sell and the second lowest priced. A dog friendly Vermont vacation package built around one cabin you have entirely to yourself, and ground that starts at the door.
Six nights, from $1,780 per person.
Nothing here counts you and nothing follows you off the page. One word can be stored, and only the word yes, so this slip stops coming back. The whole of what that means.
The last 1.1 miles to the cabin are dirt, and they climb about 240 feet. That number matters more than anything else on this page, because it is the reason a sedan with worn tires has a bad time here in April and a fine time in September. Everything else about the week follows from the road: you drive in with your own car, you unload once, and you do not move the car again unless you want to.
Six nights, one building, no shared hallway. That is the shape of the dog friendly vermont vacation package we sell in central Vermont, and it is the shortest trip in our catalog. Cabins sit between 1,150 and 1,600 feet on town roads off the spine of the Green Mountains, most of them within four miles of national forest boundary. The lodging is self catering, which is the plain reason the dog comes everywhere: there is no lobby, no breakfast room and no housekeeping schedule to work around.
Second lowest priced on the site, and still not cheap, because you are paying for a whole building rather than a room in one. That trade is the entire product. We would rather say it once and clearly than bury it.
- How far the dog comes
- The dog is with you for the whole six nights, indoors and out, because the cabin is yours alone and every walk on the sheet starts from the driveway.
- What is actually included
- Six nights in a two or three bedroom self catering cabin held for your party only, wood for the stove and a first load of kindling; a printed sheet of eight walks from the door with distances and surfaces; the local dirt road map with the seasonal roads marked; a written route in from wherever you start driving, with the last graded mile described turn by turn.
- What the dog is shut out of
- Nothing on this itinerary is closed to the dog, and that is the whole reason the trip costs what it costs. We checked it the only way it can be checked: the cabin is booked whole rather than as a room, so no shared building rule applies; every walk on the sheet is on town road, class 4 road or national forest ground where leashed dogs are allowed year round; and there is no ticketed site, no tour and no indoor booking anywhere in the six nights. If you add a restaurant or a museum yourself, that is your own arrangement and it may well be a closed door.
- What it does not include
- Your car, its fuel and its wear on eleven miles of dirt; all food and drink for the week; anything you buy in town; laundry; state park day use fees if you drive to a swimming area rather than walk to one; the cleaning fee some cabins bill separately, which we name in the figure letter before you agree to anything; any boarding, sitting or care arrangement for the dog, which we do not book and do not arrange; and anything to do with your dog's health, which belongs with your own veterinarian and not with this office.
- Who should not book this
- Anyone who wants a town at the end of the day. The nearest gas and grocery is a fourteen minute drive and it closes early. The last mile is unpaved and pitched, and a low car will scrape in spring. The walks are steep in the first half mile, wet underfoot most of the year, and none of them are surfaced. If somebody in the party cannot manage a rough climbing mile, or if a dog cannot be leashed near a road, this is the wrong week.
What the cabin is, and what the ground does the moment you step off the porch
Expect a wood frame cabin of two or three bedrooms, a stove, a full kitchen, and a porch facing whichever way the builder liked. Water is usually a drilled well. Cell service ranges from two bars to nothing at all depending on which side of the ridge you are on, and a couple of the cabins have no service whatsoever, which we tell you in writing before you agree to a property. There is a landline in some, not in others.
The walks sheet is the part people actually use. Eight routes from the driveway, between 0.8 and 5.4 miles, all of them measured on foot rather than pulled off a map. Four are old logging tracks, wide, rutted, and grown over in the middle with grass. Two follow a class 4 town road, which in Vermont means a legal road the town does not maintain, and in practice means two ruts and a stripe of ferns. Two climb to open ledge with a view east across the valley, and those two are the steep ones: roughly 900 feet of gain in the first mile and a half, on loose rock in places.
Swimming holes are the reason a lot of people book June through August. The nearest is a nineteen minute walk downhill along a brook, a chest deep pool under a ledge with a gravel bank a dog can walk in and out of without scrambling. Water temperature there sits in the low sixties even in a hot August week, and the pool drops to knee depth in a dry September. There are three more within a two mile walk. All are on open ground, none are ticketed, none have a gate.
from $1,780per person
- Behind the number
- The least this office has paid to put a party into this week during the past year, not a rate card.
- Counted how
- Per head, two sharing, one dog, and that dog's lodging supplement folded in here instead of appearing at the door.
- Pushes it up
- Taking a whole place rather than a room, bringing a second dog, a holiday week, a property that prices by the size of the animal, and deciding late.
- Goes firm
- The moment a property puts its own name to a written line saying it will take your dog on those exact dates.
You settle up with the property itself, through whatever system it happens to use. None of it routes through this office and no card is ever shown to anybody here.
The months this works, and the six weeks it does not
Mud season is real, it is not a joke Vermonters make at the expense of visitors, and it is why this page exists in the form it does. From roughly mid March to early May the frost comes out of the ground from the top down, the dirt roads turn to a foot of soft brown soup over frozen subsoil, and towns post weight limits. Some class 4 roads close outright. A car can and does sink to the axle on a road that looked fine an hour earlier. We do not sell this cabin week during that stretch, and if you ask for late April we will tell you why not.
The rest of the calendar is genuinely good, in different ways, and the walks change character completely between them.
- late May to mid June
- Blackflies. They are worst in the woods on still days between about 10am and dusk, and they thin out after the first hot spell. Roads dry, brooks high and fast, everything green in a week.
- late June to August
- Highs usually 74F to 82F on the valley floor, cooler at the cabin. Swimming holes at working depth. Afternoon thunderstorms build over the ridge two or three days a week and pass in under an hour.
- September to mid October
- The best walking of the year. Highs 58F to 70F, no bugs, firm ground, brooks low enough to cross dry footed. Foliage weeks in early October price higher and book out first.
- late October to November
- Bare, wet, brown, quiet, and the lowest priced six nights on offer. Hunting seasons run in these weeks on national forest and town land, and blaze orange on both of you is the local habit.
- December to early March
- Snow from a few inches to four feet. The last mile is plowed but not sanded, and you need real winter tires. Logging tracks become snowshoe routes. Highs from 12F to 34F.
- mid March to early May
- Mud season. We do not book this cabin week then.
What gets settled before you send anything
Nothing is held until you have the figure letter in hand and have read the property sheet for the specific cabin, which names the road surface, the cell coverage, the stove type and the cleaning fee. A message gets read before that working day ends. A figure takes two to four working days, because we are calling actual owners and waiting for them to call back.
- AskTell us your window, party size, and how many dogs. We come back with two or three cabins that fit, with their road descriptions and their real distances to a grocery.
- FigureA written total: nightly rate, cleaning fee, wood, any pet fee the owner charges, and the tax. No figure moves after this letter unless you change the dates.
- HoldThe owner holds the week on our request. You get the walks sheet and the route in at this point, not after, so you can look at the last mile before you commit.
- ConfirmDeposit goes to the property, not to us. You get the door code or key arrangement, the well and stove notes, and a phone number for the owner.
Ask about the road before you ask about anything else
People write to us about the cabin and the swimming holes, and those are easy. The question worth asking first is whether your car handles a graded dirt mile in the month you want, because that answer decides which of these cabins is even on the table. Send the month, the party, and what you drive.