The clock has stopped!  The pallet went down, but the clock didn't stop right away.  Just like last year, the rope was caught up in the ice enough to prevent an instant plunge into the depths, but as the sun warmed and melted the remaining ice, it let go at 10:06 a.m.  Fred and I were away all morning, but we weren't surprised when we checked with Diane on our way home.  We have two winners.  Kelsey Phillips, who lives in Iowa, is Dot and Chris Wilson's granddaughter, and Grandpa Chris made out the ticket for her without letting anyone know.  Now that was a nice surprise!!

The other winner, Bill Brochu, lives in Springfield, Massachusetts, and is Garey and Jane Larrabee's nephew.  Bill said he bought on-line tickets at the very last minute before we shut down on April 1st.  

It's very nice that both winners have Joe's Pond connections.  We're happy for them.  There were over 13,000 tickets sold this year, and 776 of them were for today; but only two had the time right.
 
This is Woody yesterday watching the video of a partridge drumming.  He was fascinated by it - I'm sure he'd heard and perhaps even witnessed them in real life, but he watched intently and finally peeked around the back of the computer screen looking for that noisy darned bird.

We went to Littleton today and were surprised that they are working on the bridge that crosses the Connecticut River.  On the way back we had to detour onto Route 18 because the north bound lane of the bridge is where they are working. So when we got nearly to St. Johnsbury, we debated whether to get back on the interstate or go through town.  When we had been in St. J. earlier, there was construction on the interstate going towards Lyndonville and also on Route 5 in St. J. Center.  It seemed more direct to go through town, but that turned out to be a big mistake.  We had forgotten that Western Avenue is torn up; we were held up there about 20 minutes - no way really to get around it and out of town any other way, although we might have been able to take some of the side streets from Main Street to get onto Cliff Street to avoid the Western Avenue snag - but some of those back streets are being worked on, too.  St. Johnsbury is going to have a rough summer, I'm afraid.  Next trip into town, we'll plot our course very carefully - and allow extra time.  Shades of Danville Past!