5 Things to Do in Burlington, VT with Kids and Teens

Travel dates: July, 2021

I had very high hopes for Burlington, and I was pretty sure it was going to live up to them on our first night there, when we walked down to the beach at Lake Champlain from our campsite and then meandered along the shore as the sun set.

Burlington very much has a small city feel, but, as Vermont’s biggest city, it also comes with some nice features (like the excellent science museum) you might expect in a bigger city. We spent 6 nights in the area (with kids from 8 up to 20…not so much a kid anymore!), and in this post I’ll talk about the stuff we did in Burlington itself, with more to come about the surrounding area.

 ECHO, Leahy Center

We took Abe to the Leahy Center and let the big kids stay behind in the trailer. The three of us had a great time; it’s always nice when Abe gets a chance to do a younger kid-centric activity and have his parents all to himself–both things that don’t happen terribly often when you’re the youngest of 4. The museum is right on the waterfront downtown, so we walked there along the bike path from the campground (around a mile and a half).

We spent time on the way taking in the fabulous views:

We got free admission with our ASTC reciprocal membership at our local science museum, but normal admission is $18 for adults and $14.50 for kids.

Even before you get inside, there’s an impressive array of outdoor exhibits to check out:

So we’ve been to science museums in countless cities, and there are always a lot of similarities…but our favorite parts are generally the ones that are specific to that area; in this case, that meant the exhibit about Lake Champlain. You can climb through a shipwreck, go to feeding time for local fish, and learn about Champy the lake monster. I seem to have no pictures of any of this, because it was pretty dark in there. Like if you’re in a lake! 

You’ll also find all the usual science experiment type things:

And a staffed area where, on the day we were visiting, experiments with color involving DIY buttons were going on:

There’s also an adorable play area that Abe was really too big for, but I made us check it out anyway, because it was so cute:

The big kids met up with us when we were finished at the museum for ice cream at Creemees, right next door:

Ride Bikes

I’ve already mentioned plenty of times that our campground was right on the bike path in Burlington. Sadly, we didn’t have our bikes with us on this trip or we would have been back and forth on that thing constantly (we still went back and forth on it on foot quite a bit, but bikes would have been a lot faster).

We rented bikes downtown at Local Motion:

You can reserve in advance, and we needed to do this since we needed a trail-a-bike for Abe (I think they only had one, and someone else had it rented already the first time we checked). Renting bikes is expensive, so we kept ours just for a few hours instead of overnight…in retrospect, we wished we’d kept them longer so we wouldn’t have needed to rush so much.

Back when we’d been planning to bring our own bikes, we learned that one can take the Island Line, the path that goes past the campground, all the way out onto Lake Champlain via the Colchester Causeway and across to Grand Isle, making use of a bike ferry at one point. Bike ferry!

Naturally, we were very excited about this. But then we rented bikes and had to have them back by a certain time, and our very ambitious planned bike ride had to get…less ambitious (had we done our entire planned ride, I think it would have been around 20 miles roundtrip).

But we did make it out onto the lake, which was pretty cool:

And we stopped at a park on the way back to visit with Champy:

Whenever we rent bikes, I remember that my own bike has a big comfy seat, and that I can ride it comfortably WAY longer than the average rental bike. So sore. But anyway. We returned the bikes and then rewarded ourselves for our long ride with some lunch downtown, at The Vermont Pub and Brewery:

Wander Church Street Marketplace

Church Street, Burlington’s fun and pedestrian friendly downtown shopping area, is worth some time. We went to a bookstore, bought some chocolate (sadly, we passed on getting a Champwich; this was definitely a mistake), and just soaked up the atmosphere. You’ll find lots of restaurants and sometimes live music and festivals here, too:

 

Ethan Allen Homestead

I thought I knew plenty about Ethan Allen: Green Mountain Boys, Revolutionary stuff, also furniture…but it turns out there’s MORE! Our visit to the Ethan Allen Homestead started with a lively recounting on Allen’s story in the small museum, then we all went out to see the actual homestead.

It’s a fairly short tour (the homestead isn’t very big!) but you there are lots of walking trails on the grounds if you want to extend your visit. We walked down to the river after the formal tour:

See a Baseball Game

The Vermont Lake Monsters used to a be a minor league baseball team, but they lost their affiliation when the minor leagues were reorganized a few years ago, and now they’re a collegiate summer league team. Luckily, they didn’t lose Champy as a mascot:

We always find that seeing some local baseball is a great way to break out of tourist territory in a city and also a way to get really good seats without spending a bunch of money at a major league game:

So a fun time was had by all, the Lake Monsters won, and a star struck Abe got Champy’s autograph:

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