Mark Hinson

Democrat senior writer

I am a fifth-generation native Floridian, so I'm used to living in a gorgeous state where people trash the joint and treat it like a rented car.

In Florida, we use sinkholes as God's natural graves for old cars and dead refrigerators. A sand dune always looks better with a high-rise condominium on it. Let's go ahead and frack the aquifer because, you know, you can always go out and buy a new fresh-water aquifer.

The perfect metaphor for Florida is Walt Disney World, which paved over a natural swamp and wetland to build an amusement park and a fake version of an African savanna.

"Don't Save It, Pave It," should be the motto of my beloved, crazy, self-hating state.

That is why it was such a culture shock when my wife and I spent a solid week in Vermont earlier this month. We stayed with our close friends, Steve and Kim, who moved to Burlington two years ago, so we got an insider's tour of the Green Mountain State.

If Florida is a constant fever dream, Vermont is a relaxing, strange nap on the porch.

Which way to Cafe Risque?

The first thing I noticed while driving through the rolling mountains of Vermont's Interstate 89 was there were no billboards hawking SeaWorld, Ron Jon Surf Shops or secession from the Union. There were no billboards at all.

"You don't have any billboards?" I asked Steve a day after I arrived. "How do you know which mega-church to attend or find your way to the next Cafe Risque?"

"Billboards are forbidden by law," he said. "They are eyesores that get in the way of the scenery."

"Dear lord, what kind of unholy pinko paradise have I entered?" I said.

The roadsides were free of fast-food bags, empty beer cans and discarded Big Gulp cups thanks to a stiff $500 fine for littering. The medians and roadways were freshly mowed. The place was as manicured as Switzerland on a Sunday. It was all so postcard pretty that I could almost forgive Vermont for unleashing the mind-numbing jam band Phish on the world.

Burlington is home to University of Vermont, which was founded in 1791 and looks a lot like the set of "Dead Poets Society" (1989).

"I had a friend from out of state who walked on campus and asked a student if the University of Vermont had a football team," Steve said. "The student had to stop and think for a minute before he said, 'I don't think so.' That has never happened on the campus of Florida State."

"I thought the University of Vermont had a football team and was called The Rootin'-Tootin' Raving Socialists," I said.

Unlike Florida, the concept of urban sprawl never caught on in Vermont, which has the second smallest population in the United States. Nearly every carefully preserved town has mom-and-pop shops, farm-to-table restaurants, independent bookstores, local brew pubs and non-chain music shops surrounding the village square. In Florida, we carefully manufacture such cozy towns as Seaside and Celebration to remind us of what we have already destroyed.

If you want to shop at a Walmart in Burlington, you have to drive 29 miles north to St. Albans, near the Canadian border. St. Albans is famous for a raid in 1864 when American Confederate soldiers, who were hiding out in Canada, headed south to rob three banks in St. Albans before shooting up the town. With that kind of hell-raisin' Civil War pedigree, of course, St. Albans has a Walmart.

The state's painfully quaint capital city, Montpelier, looks like a town found inside a snow globe. It is home to a simple, gold-domed capitol building, which is, more important, just a quick walk away from Chill Gelato, a tiny storefront that sells the most delicious gelato found this side of the Spanish Steps in Rome, Italy.

Montpelier is sort of the Bizarro World opposite reflection of Tallahassee, where our stately Old Capitol is overshadowed by a 22-story architectural monstrosity that may be a Transformer robot suffering from an overdose of Viagra.

Let's go look for Champ

After we spent nearly a week roaming the tourist-dense Church Street in Burlington and the back roads of the Vermont dairy lands, Steve called his friend, Brian Boardman, who keeps a 30-foot motorboat docked on Lake Champlain near downtown Burlington. Brian offered to take us out on the water for a spin on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Lake Champlain is allegedly home to Champ, a giant water serpent in the tradition of The Loch Ness Monster. In 1609, French explorer Samuel de Champlain spotted the long-necked beast while fighting the local Iroquois tribe over front-row tickets to a Phish concert. Or something like that.

These days, Burlington is home to the minor-league baseball team the Vermont Lake Monsters, which features Tallahassee's John Nogowski as an infielder. I did not get the chance to quiz Nogowski about his team's mascot, but I did talk to Brian about it.

"No, I've never seen Champ," Boardman said as he pointed out the wood cabin where he spent his boyhood summers growing up on Lake Champlain. "And I've spent a lot of time on this water."

That still did not stop me from mistaking every floating log in Lake Champlain for the backbone of a plesiosaur.

Boardman, who is in his late 40s, was one of the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street during the boom days in the late '80s and '90s. About 15 years ago, he burned out on the high-pressure Manhattan lifestyle and headed back to Vermont, where he and his wife bought a house.

"At the closing, I asked the previous owners for the keys to the front door," Boardman said. "The owner said, 'Oh, I don't know where they are, we never lock the door.' In New York, we had about 10 different locks on our door."

That type of laid-back, live-and-let-live Vermont attitude was contagious during our stay. In neighboring New Hampshire, the motto is: "Live Free Or Die." Vermont's should be: "Tie-dye A Shirt."

"Everyone is very laid back until you decide to put some new awning on your house or put up a new mailbox. Then everyone is in your business," Boardman said. "Vermonters do not like change and have plenty to say about it."

Boardman pointed to the top of a nearby mountain where I could barely make out the windmill-like turbines in a wind farm. They looked like some sort of art installation. How much more environmentally friendly could you get?

"You would not believe the fight that went on over those wind turbines," Boardman said. "People raised holy hell over it."

"So I should not bring up my idea for a putting in a fracking farm next door to Ethan Allen's home while I'm up here, huh?" I said.

"Don't even say the word 'frack' while you are here," Boardman said.

"Well, I guess I'd better get the frack back to Florida," I said. "We aren't quite finished killing all the oysters in Apalachicola Bay. There is work to be done."

More from Mark Hinson:

Thanks for the music (and the sherry), Miss Clara

Beware of the 'Cobragator' at Caverns State Park

Dying young: 'Fault in Our Stars' is a killer