Vermont

There was a threat of rain on Friday when we headed for Vermont. It turned out to be a mostly dry but cloudy day. It's a good thing we went though because it rained in earnest on Saturday.

Some of the things we did were things we did 5 years ago. We went to Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream. Five years ago we arrived in the afternoon and learned there was a wait of an hour or two to take a tour. We had to skip it then. This time we arrived early in the day and had no trouble getting in. As it turns out, the tour was just okay. Truthfully, the tour we took of Dreyer's in the Oakland, CA area was a much better tour.

We went to an Apple Cider "factory". This is apple harvest season so they were actually making cider by cold pressing chopped up apples. Oh - fresh pressed ice cold apple cider is so very yummy. Have you ever wondered what the difference is between cider and juice? According to these people, cider is 100% apple, while juice has water, sugar, or something added.

Then we stopped at a glass blowing shop and watch the artisans at work.

Then, we found a 5.5 mile bike path (one way) and went for a ride. Much to our surprise, there was a covered bridge at the end of the path. It was a great ride.

As you can see from the photo, autumn continues to arrive. Each day it seems that more and more trees are turning colors. The ones that started turning first are already losing their leaves. Some areas are more advanced than others. I think the peak may be in a couple weeks, but we'll see.

From there, we headed for a Morgan Horse Farm (don't ask me why it's not called a ranch). Believe it or not, this too is a National Historic Site. We called ahead and were told the last tour was at 3:30. We arrived about 3:20 to find that the 3:00 tour was late so they combined the last two of the day and started 10 minutes before we got there. We joined it in progress but missed whatever they had to say about the grounds and basically got an introduction to Morgan Horse blood lines, which was not the most interesting thing to us. The barn itself is magnificent (built in the late 1800's). The horses are beautiful. We saw many in their stalls but the bars on the windows prevented any contact beyond stratching a soft nose here and there.