Vermont Vacation

Back in June Les and I took a short vacation to Vermont.  I have been meaning to post about it and share photos for a while. But I took a ton of photos and the task was rather daunting. So I've decided to split it up. I already posted my theory about Vermont being the Oregon of the East Coast, this post will be about the basics of our vacation. I have another post in the works about our trip to the cheesiest, corniest museum ever and one documenting our exploration of the covered bridges.

View of Lake Champlain from the deck.

First off, thanks are in order to my wonderful coworker (and sadly, basically my only friend in this ridiculously overpopulated state) Mary. She graciously allowed us the use of her cabin on Lake Champlain. In great vacation tradition, it rained the entire trip. And the cabin has a tin roof and no insulation. It was a wonderful sound... for about the first two hours. Then it was incredibly loud and hard to sleep, at least for me Les has been known to sleep through much worse, including earthquakes. But the rain made for some beautiful scenery.

Breakfast on the deck was lovely. Les spent all morning playing some color/shape block game on his iPod.

And when we were done eating, it was raining so hard we were able to wash the dishes in it. (Don't worry Mary, we used soap and the sink later, this was just to show the amount of rain.

Les walking out from the "driveway."

One of the best things about Vermont is, of course, Ben and Jerry's. We took the factory tour and tried a sample and purchased a few souvenirs.  It was really cool not so much to see how they make ice cream, learn about a socially responsible company. I was also intrigued by all the different flavors they have, and have had over the years. Some I wanted to try and others just sounded disgusting.

A replica of the Ben and Jerry's tour bus, the original burned to the ground in 1986 (we learned that in a slide show).

At the end of the tour they give you a sample.

Bad lighting, but good samples.

They have a graveyard for discontinued flavors.

I found this interesting.

Tanks of ingredients, soon to be Stephen Colbert's Americone Dream.

Really cool-looking rusty tower, terribly back-lit.

If amazing ice cream wasn't enough to make a rainy vacation super-awesome, beer is. Since we were in Burlington anyway, we stopped in at the Magic Hat brewery. I don't drink beer (it's a smell issue) but Les is on his way to becoming quite the fancy-schmancy beer drinker. The brewery was really cool and Les got a great deal on a case of summer ale.

Les tried to pull it over, and the color is more accurate on this one.

That's a lot of beer.

This is the only photo I took of the Cabot plant, I was too busy eating cheese.

This was a factory heavy vacation, it probably wouldn't have been if we had gone hiking or canoeing, but it was just too rainy for that. In addition to the ice cream and beer, we saw the Cabot cheese factory. The tour wasn't as interesting as Ben and Jerry's, but they gave us samples of dozens of different kinds of cheddar and it was amazing. I had never heard of Cabot before moving to the east coast, but I love it! We also did some sightseeing and saw the Vermont capitol building, for some reason I don't really remember.

Capitol building in Montpelier.

There were cannons and odd, skulky-looking statues at the capitol, Les climbed on one of them.

Taking scenery photos on the side of the highway.

Falls in Middlebury, where we had a great dinner.

We also visited the New England Maple Syrup Museum and hunted down some covered bridges but both of those things have enough photos to deserve their own posts. Overall a great trip!

And a goodbye scoop for the drive home. Les's was chock full of coffee flavors and mine had more chocolate then I've ever had in my entire life.