Day 7- So this was our 'tour day'. We skipped across Vermont going on factory tours and sampling local treats. It was rainy, windy and cold -so a good day for indoor stuff.
Our first stop enroute to Vermont was Littleton, New Hampshire. Somewhere I had stumbled upon a recommendation for a Miller's Bakery there and wrote it into our itinerary for the novelty of the name, thinking we could pick up some baked goods. However, we had just eaten breakfast at our motel and were not hungry so we grabbed a couple pictures and called it good enough.
view from the covered bridge
That's the Miller's Bakery.
Next we drove to St Johnsbury Vermont, to the Maple Grove Farms and Sugarhouse Museum. There are lots of sugarhouses in the area but this was the wrong season for any to be in operation so I settled for a museum; we could kinda get the idea here.
We spent a rather long time browsing through the gift shop and came away with real maple syrup and pure maple candy (which makes me feel all Laura & Mary Ingalls-ish when I bite into it). We also tried the maple soft serve ice cream. Yes, it is as tasty as it sounds.
Next we went to the Cabot Cheese Factory. They are no longer allowed to take tour groups through their factory -there is one tiny viewing window (pictured below)- but the upside is that the video "tour" is free. Our tour guide asked if there was anyone who never had Cabot cheese before; Richard & I raised our hand. (I've seen it but don't recall ever eating any.) She asked where we are from,
(I mean seriously, what hick town do these folks live in? Cabot is nationwide.) When we said, her response was of the
that explains it nature. She admitted we come from the state of really good cheese.
2019 is their 100th anniversary. Cool.
They had 30 some cheeses available to sample, so we went around the table sampling cheese like all the other tourists. Their specialty is cheddar. We came away with 5 blocks of various flavors.
Our next tour was the Rock of Ages granite quarry in Graniteville, near Barre.
That white van you see in the background is the tour van. When we arrived, the van was booked full but our tour guide was of the 'there are still good people left on the earth' variety- he allowed us and several others to drive our personal vehicles to the tour site, and even loaned out his personal car to someone traveling in a motorhome!
Interesting tour. They went from an employee count of 200 back in the day to just 6 today, thanks to automation. (Considering the occupational hazard of quarrying -white lung disease, it's not all bad to replace men with machines.) The short answer for why 2 of the ponds are so blue is because there are minerals in the water.
The visitors center had samples of their work and also information about some of the unique projects they were commissioned to make, like this to-scale Mercedes tombstone. Unbelievable.
There is an outdoor granite bowling alley on the grounds but it was a little too chilly for that. You can also go inside the factory and watch the carvers at work, but my family didn't believe me and wanted to leave when we got back from the pit so I got short-changed.
(Just for the satisfaction of being right, I looked it up after we got home- yes, there is a self-guided tour in the factory building.) Being neither dead nor a sculpter, we didn't leave with any souvenirs here.
So we've all heard of Green Mountain Coffee, right? But prior to researching for this trip, I didn't get the connection that the brand name comes from the company being located in the Green Mountains of Vermont. They have a Visitor's Center & Cafe in Waterbury VT. Complete with interactive displays about their 'source to cup' business model, and free samples of coffee. The weather was conducive to ordering hot drinks from their cafe.
The visitors center & cafe is located in a restored 1875 train station.
A little farther on in Waterbury, we stopped at Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Factory. There was an incredibly long line just to get tickets for the tour; we would've had to wait at least an hour to get on a tour, so we said no thanks. We considered treating ourselves to ice cream but the line at the Scoop Shop was just as crazy; we were not that hard up. Been there, but haven't done that.
3 miles up the road is Cold Hollow Cider Mill. We enjoyed this place and spent a fair amount of time there. The picture isn't very good since it was taken through dirty glass, but the 1920s rack & cloth cider press is on the right hand side- there is apple juice running out of those plastic slats in the press. The men are dumping the squished apple remains into a bin to get carted off and fed to the hogs.
The pasteurizing room
There were free cider samples. The store had just about anything you can imagine -so interesting!
Arianna got a cider slushie and shared it with the rest of us -delicious.
Of course, we couldn't leave without a bag of fresh cider doughnuts.
Ok, that is just too cool to watch a real live Donut Robot! Totally Homer Price!
(Another Robert McCloskey book, which they do sell right there.)
Our last stop of the day was The Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe. It is a beautiful view across the valley and I can understand why the von Trapps settled there. But it's so commercialized now. We took a couple pictures and left again. $500/night for a room? Think we'll pass.
I had one other stop on the itinerary- the Vermont Ski & Snowboard Museum, but it was closing soon and we were not going to be "those people" so we had to eliminate that. We headed back down to Killington VT where we had a room booked at a ski resort on the mountain. How cool is that? We needed to get some solid food in our stomachs after snacking on samples all day; we ordered pizza from iPie there on the mountain. It was like the best pizza EVER.
Day 8- The next morning we tried to eat breakfast at our motel, with tried being the operative word. Shortly after we got to the breakfast area, a large family of a different ethnicity showed up and commandeered the area and the food. I never. I'm not trying to be rude or anything, but apparently when people of this ethnicity say "excuse me" [in their heavily accented English] what they really mean is "get out of the way, I'm coming through". So we just left 'em to it.
We had 2 options: head south into Massachusetts and catch the Norman Rockwell museum in Stockbridge or head west across New York and stop at Niagara Falls -to break up the long drive home. Niagara Falls got the vote- largely to get more of the driving out of the way before we stopped for our last sight-seeing destination. We arrived in Niagara Falls around 3pm. This was an add-on to our trip, not part of the original plan. I had not researched it, so we drove around the block till we figured out where we want to go -a good lesson for the kids, namely that all their mother's pre-trip research does benefit them quite a bit. The first parking lot we pulled into was $30 so we went around the block again to find one for a more reasonable $10.
We decided to do Cave of the Winds this time. (We rode Maid of the Mist before, although Arianna was too young to remember it.) So we knew about the yellow plastic raincoat before we went, but folks, did you know they also give you souvenir foam sandals to wear? The cool footwear alone is worth the ticket price! Not. 🤣
Actually they will make good shower shoes when we go camping.
And I was really glad for dry shoes & socks to put back on after the tour because ours would've been sopping!
The rainbow is a promise that the earth will never again flood...
but it does not mean you won't get drenched. lol
Totally, totally fun! We went up on the hurricane deck and everything.
Horseshoe Falls -from the American side.
We had our passports along but decided not to go over to the Canada this time.
And the American falls
We were hungry by 6pm so we left Niagara Falls and drove away from the city before we stopped to eat. We booked a motel a couple hours farther along our route. Richard was feeling like he could drive on home, but as it turned out, after we left Dennys, we got into some high wind that made driving miserable so we were all relieved to stop for the night.
Day 9- One last motel breakfast and one last time hefting suitcases into the van. Drove the final hours home, arriving around 2pm. We had a good time, but it's good to be home and get back to normal life. Hope you enjoyed traveling with us!
