Vermont

 We woke up to misty rain - it was still pretty out but it's sure not as fun to drive in the rain to see things!  Headed into town hoping we could eat at the pancake house I had picked out the day before but the line was out the door - nope - no time for waiting in line!  So grabbed breakfast sandwiches AND coffee to go!  Did I mention before that none of the places in Maine or NH had whip cream for my coffee!!  I thought that was kind of strange!!  

Anyway, we packed up and loaded the car in the rain - and we were off to Vermont!  We had reservations for the Ben & Jerry's tour at 11:00am and were only a couple of hours from the town of Waterbury so we made it in plenty of time!

It was raining pretty good when we arrived at Ben & Jerry's - the parking lot was pretty darn small from what we could see but someone happened to pull out and we pulled right in behind them - yay!  And then later discovered there's a huge parking lot up the hill!  Luckily I carried our umbrella up to the huge building or we would have been soaked by the time we got inside!

Was it busy?  OH MY, YES!  Our tour wasn't for a while so we looked around and snapped some pictures while we were waiting!

15 pints tall - YES!

And lots of flavors on that wall!

Finally it was time for our tour - they weren't actually making ice cream that day since it was a Saturday (and Columbus Day Weekend so a 3 day weekend which made it SUPER busy!!) but we still got to see where everything was made and it was an excellent tour!

We watched a short movie and I didn't realize that Ben & Jerry no longer own it, but the name will always be the same!    There are 3 other warehouses that make Ben and Jerry's ice cream but this place was the original start-up of the ice cream!

300,000 to 400,000 pints are made at this factory daily - 144,000 gallons of cream are used for that amount along with 7200 gallons of milk - WHEW!

After the tour, we were all invited to sample one of the "new" flavors that is not out yet - so we all tried a butterscotch one and it was delicious!

Just had to take a picture of my favorite ice cream - CHUNKY MONKEY!

After the tour, we donned the umbrella and went out into the rain, up to the Flavor Graveyard - it was fun to walk around and see all the flavors that DIDN'T last!

Apparently Pina Colada was not a hit!

Getting out onto the 2 lane road to head to our next place was almost impossible!!  We needed to turn left but there was NO way we could do that so had to go up and turn around - traffic was almost at a standstill because there was SO MUCH!

We got turned around and were only a couple of miles from where we were going - Cold Hollow Cider Mill - and just couldn't figure out why there was such a line!  It took us about 45 minutes to go those 2 miles and once we got up there, we could see that most EVERYBODY WAS turning into the cider mill!  Gosh - I had NO IDEA it was such a tourist trip!

But we finally got there - finally found a parking spot - and finally got into the huge building where they sold all kinds of "cider" related things!  We looked a round a while and finally got in line with our purhase and got our cider donuts - yes, they were excellent!!

The back room had free drinks of apple cider - yum - and a nice video going of making the cider!  It was a nice place, just too bad it was SO busy!!

We had planned to ride the gondola up to Mt. Mansfield where you can see for miles - but it was quite expensive and I opted to just wait to see what the weather would be like - good thing I didn't book in advance because I'm not even sure they were operating because of the rain!

When we left the cider place, we had to go back out to the interstate and the traffic was backed up off the exit and onto the interstate - glad we were heading away!

It was a nice drive to reach our destination for the night, Aerie Inn of Vermont!  The hillsides were gorgeous, just no sun to show the brilliant colors!

It was an actual downpour by the time we reached the inn which was out in the country!  I ran in to take care of the reservation and the gal talked and talked and talked - Glenn thought I got lost!!  But I did find out that there were NO restaurants in the tiny town a couple miles away and that we would have to drive to another town, 10 miles away for dinner!

Our room was lovely - and the whole grounds were lovely, you just couldn't appreciate it with the rain!  We opted to not even unload the car for a while since it was pouring so hard!

Glenn took a nap but I got him up early evening as it was STILL raining and we needed to get to town and eat before it got dark - I knew it would be super hard to even find this road at night and in the rain!  

Once we got into town, we knew darkness was coming fast so we just got our order to go and made it home as it was growing darker and darker!  Our meal was great (fettuccine and cheesy bread) and there was even enough for the next night!

Our room had these pretty business cards AND 2 chocolates  - they were delicious!  

And we fell asleep to the rain and the wind outside.......