As I mentioned last week, my wife and I recently took a trip to Burlington Vermont to celebrate our 15th anniversary. There were a number of factors that led to me choosing Burlington as our destination.
When we started talking about getting away, 
I had a leftover list from Spring Break that included:
- Portland, OR (I know, not East)
- Savanah, GA
- PCH (Pacific Coast Highway also not East)
- Colorado (don't say it)
- Blueridge Parkway
- Austin, TX (South is kind of East right?)
- Manhattan, NY
As I said though,
After doing a lot of research online, I eventually narrowed it down to a handful of small towns in Vermont. I basically just Googled "romantic small town destinations in Vermont" and this is what I got:
- Stowe, VT
- Burlington, VT
- Woodstock, VT
- Waterbury, VT
I quickly realized that pretty much every one of those options required that we fly into Burlington as it is the largest city with the largest airport in the area. I figured why not just stay in a bigger town and rent a car so we could enjoy the nightlife but still go out exploring.
Thaks to the magic of credit card rewards points, I was able to get our flight to and from Burlington for "free" as well as our rental car. The only thing that was left to pay for was the hotel room. I decided to splurge a little bit on that, but in the end, I am not sure it was really worth it.
I'm not going to do a full review on the hotel in this post, but I will cover some rough aspects of it.
Based on where we live in the state of Michigan, we have a few options as to where we fly out of. Detroit Wayne is the big airport and pretty much every local flight for us has a connection at DTW. Flint Bishop is about an hour down the road and is a smaller regional airport than Detroit. Finally, a short five or ten minute drive from our house is MBS airport.
We love flying out of MBS, but the cost is usually higher and since everything connects through DTW, you usually end up in Detroit anyway.
To keep our point cost down, we decided to fly out of Detroit. We left our house around 11 AM to make the two hour drive down to DTW. We weren't sure what traffic was going to be like so we wanted to give ourselves plenty of time for the 2:40 departure time.
Likewise, we didn't know what security was going to be like at DTW.
Traffic on 275 outside of Detroit was pretty bad and the weather was quite crumby when we left the airport. The line through security was long, but it honestly wasn't too bad.
I wrote a little bit the other day about how we almost waited too long at the wrong gate, but ultimately we made it onto the plane with little issue.
Promptly at 2:40 we were taxiing out on the runway and we were in the air. It was a direct hour and a half flight from Detroit to Burlington and we had zero issues with turbulence or weather during our flight.
We actually arrived in Burlington a little ahead of schedule around 4:00 and after a brief delay after I stood at the wrong rental car counter for 15 minutes, we were on our way to the hotel. About a year ago I got a free Tile as a gift from a conference that I attended. It turned out we didn't need it in our checked bag as that arrived without issue. It was nice to have it there just for peace of mind.
This was our ride for the five days that we were in Vermont. They said the Nissan Rogue was a little bit of an upgrade from the vehicle that I had originally booked via Avis. In the past I would have used Enterprise, but after a couple of bad experiences and reading about 
It was free after all thanks to my credit card points remember. I was actually really happy with the service and vehicle I got from Avis. I'd use them again in the future for sure.
I had a bit of an issue getting out of the parking garage with the Rogue. It had a shifter that I wasn't familiar with and somehow I put it in manual mode. I had to use the paddle shifters to change gears, but I managed.
Traffic to our hotel from the Airport was pretty thick, but Burlington isn't a huge town, so it didn't take us more than 20 minutes to get from point a to point b.
We stayed at the Hilton Lake Champlain Burlington. As I mentioned, I splurged a little on the hotel since the flight and car were covered. I got us a corner room with a lakeside view and the grand total was $3000 USD total for the five nights.
Looking back now, that was probably way more than I should have spent and given the weather the lakeview didn't end up being everything it could have been. It is what it is though and I can't really change it now.
There are a few other things that left me a little apprehensive about how much I paid for the hotel, but as I said, I will cover that in a different post.
Checked in and settled in our top floor hotel room,
Keep an eye on my blog to find out where we ended up!
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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or