A Full Day in Burlington — Church Street, Chocolate & a Lake Champlain Beach

This was our last full day of the whole trip, and we spent it the way you should spend a last day: slow, in one good town, with nothing we had to do. Burlington made that easy. Everything we wanted was within a flat walk or a short drive — downtown, the lake, a beach — and after two-plus weeks on the road, an unhurried Saturday in a great little city was exactly the speed we needed.

A slow Saturday morning downtown

We slept in, then walked into the Church Street Marketplace for a coffee-and-wander morning. It’s a few blocks of brick pedestrian street right in the middle of downtown — easy, flat, lined with shops and cafés — and on a Saturday it has a nice unhurried buzz to it.

The stop the kids voted for: the Lake Champlain Chocolates flagship café on Church Street. Vermont chocolate made right in town, truffles and hot cocoa, samples for the kids, and boxed chocolates we grabbed to take home — the kind of edible souvenir that’s actually better than a magnet. (Vermont’s whole thing is the food: maple, cheddar, chocolate, ice cream. We did our part.)

Down to the lake

From downtown it’s a short flat drop to the Lake Champlain waterfront. We spent part of the morning down there by the water before the real question of the day came up: which beach for the afternoon.

It came down to Oakledge Park versus North Beach. North Beach is Burlington’s big sand beach — the one with lifeguards, a snack bar, and a playground. Oakledge is more of a park hang: a rocky lakeshore with a small shallow beach, an accessible treehouse, fields, and a lakeside stone sundial called the Burlington Earth Clock. We went back and forth — Owen and Brooklyn wanted sand — and landed on North Beach for an honest beach afternoon.

The beach afternoon

North Beach was the right call. The kids got their swim and their sand, even if Lake Champlain in mid-June is brisk — the water was still down in the low 60s, so it was a quick-dip kind of day, towels at the ready. We had the snack bar and the playground right there, picnic tables in the shade, and a long lazy afternoon by the lake to close out the trip. Exactly the low-key, everyone-happy hang we wanted on the last full day.

Last sunset on the water

For the final evening we did the Burlington thing one more time: back down to the waterfront by King Street dock for an early dinner on the lake and the last sunset of the trip. The sun goes down across Lake Champlain behind the Adirondacks, and Burlington puts on a good show for it. We packed up that night for an early flight home, but we made sure to catch the sunset first — a good last frame on a trip that gave us a lot of them.

Up next → wheels up at dawn — the long way home from Vermont, and a look back at the whole trip.