The day dawned at 37 degrees and nothing but sun, sun, sun! You couldn’t ask for anything better for an autumn day in Vermont. Gary had planned a day of local sightseeing with some unusual activities.

After taking a group picture at 8:30 AM we proceeded to our first destination, which is probably the main reason people even bother visiting Stowe- a visit to the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory for a tour and obviously a tasting.  We were pumped-even though we would be there at 10AM. Ice cream is good any time of the day. A part of the installation is a graveyard holding tombstones of ice cream favors that came and went. It was hilarious, as each tombstone had a limerick explaining why the flavor is gone and the years of its life. I was rather surprised that there were over 30 such “graves” but once I started reading the epitaphs of some of them I even wondered how they survived as long as they had.

The tour is very popular and is sold to the general public for $4/person. The tours  leave every 10 minutes and there were probably 30 people per group. We first saw a 6 minute video on the history of the company (It was started in 1978), then shown the actual manufacturing process. The last part of the tour was a tasting of the flavor of the day which was vanilla laced with butterscotch crunch. We learned that the plant here packages 300-400,000 pints a day! Ben & Jerry opened an ice cream parlor in Burlington, VT in a filling station after taking a $5 correspondence course in making ice cream. Their success came from loading the ice cream with “chunks”, something that had not been done before. The company was sold to Unilever in 2000, but has an independent board of directors.

We had some spare time before our next appointment so Gary drove us through the nearby state capital of Vermont, Montpelier. Trivia for the day: Montpelier is the smallest state capital (population 7,635) in the entire USA.

Our visit to Ben & Jerry’s was a good start for our day, but the day got better as we next stopped at the Morse maple syrup farm where they have been making maple syrup for over 200 years! One of the owners, Burr Morse, an elderly gentleman with a wicked sense of Vermont humor, entertained us with a lecture and slide show on how maple syrup is made. We learned that it takes 40 gallons of sap from a maple tree to make 1 gallon of maple syrup! Worse yet, the total harvesting season is only 4-6 weeks long and is extremely dependent on the weather. Something we learned (and had not known) was that the texture and taste of the resultant syrup changes as the outdoor temperatures during harvest changes. The earliest syrups are very pale in color, growing increasingly darker and bolder in taste as the season progresses. We had an opportunity to try the 4 different grades of syrup that are normally offered for sale.

After the lecture we were seated at tables where we each had a cup of ice and a cup of hot maple syrup. We were instructed to slowly pour a small amount of syrup onto the ice, stir it around with a fork until it hardened into a soft pice of maple candy, called maple taffy, which we could then consume. It was quite tasty. And not overly sweet.  There was a dish of donut holes on the table if you wanted to dip them into the maple syrup. There was also a dish of dill pickles which we were told would “cleanse” our palate before making more candy. God knows who decided that was a good way to cleanse the palate. I got adventuresome and tried dipping the pickle directly into the syrup and it was quite tasty! All in all this was a fantastic excursion and one of the highlights of the trip so far.

We had a late lunch in the town of Stowe, which is not very big (population 4,423) and a typical tourist town with cute shops, some dating back to the turn of the century.

We returned to the Trapp Lodge at 3:30. Some people wanted to attend the 4PM tea, Others, including me, chose to hike to the chapel the Trapp family built high on the hill behind the lodge. The path meanders through the forest along one of the cross-country ski trails the facility maintains, before climbing the hill to the chapel in about 1/2 mile. It took about 15 minutes to get there. After the walk most everyone convened in the lodge to view a short video about Maria’s return to her native Austria late in life, and clarifying what really happened during her life, not what we saw in the Sound of Music.

We chose to have dinner at their brewery located one mile from the lodge. A shuttle is available to take people back and forth. It was surprisingly crowded and we almost left when we heard it would be a 45 minute wait, but two other couples who had come earlier got called to their table just as we were going to leave and invited us to join them, which we did. Nice menu with a focus on German food, but quite  noisy making it difficult to carry on a conversation.

Tomorrow we head to New Hampshire for more “leaf peeping” and other adventures.