We just got back from a two-day trip to the Northeast Kingdom (the NE section of Vermont) and I promised Jo I'd write up the trip, in case she and Hans want to go some time.
We left Bennington at 8:00 on Friday morning, and went north to Manchester and east on Route 11. At Londonderry, we went north on 100 through Weston and Ludlow. After a quick right onto 101a, we visited the
Calvin Coolidge state historic site (http://www.historicvermont.org/coolidge). It wasn't open, but it was fun to walk around the old buildings anyway. The
Plymouth Cheese Factory is also only open between May and October, but we looked in the windows (www.FrogCityCheese.com).
We stayed on 101a north to Route 4, then east to Woodstock. The
Woodstock Inn was having its 15
th Annual Holiday Fair with over 30 VT and NE craftspeople and live piano music (woodstockinn.com). We did our best to help with Black Friday. Scott got a gorgeous pottery bowl (Willy Hill Pottery) and I got a small skein of really wild red yarn (cotton, rayon, silk and lurex) from Debbie Miller Designs of Westbrook, CT.
We didn't make it to
Billings Farm & Museum (http://www.billingsfarm.org/), in Woodstock, since it was closed Thanksgiving weekend.
Stop #2 was the
Simon Pearce glass and pottery factory in Quechee. We stayed a LONG time, then had a great lunch by a window overlooking the Oottauqeeche River. We did some more to support Black Friday. We skipped the VINS Nature Center (1/4 mile west of the Quechee Gorge on Route 4) and Quechee State Park is only open Memorial Day – October 15, but we could see Quechee Gorge ("Vermont's Little Grand Canyon", 165-foot chasm) from the bridge on Route 4.
We had to do a quick trip to the
King Arthur Flour store, since Scott had never had the privilege. (It's about a mile west of Route 91 on Route 5 at Exit 13.) We could have stayed much, much, much, longer but we already did that at Simon Pearce.
We got coffee and the paper at the
P & H Truck Stop just off Route 91 (west side of the highway) in Wells River (http://www.scenesofvermont.com/svmovies/pandh_truckstop/pandh.html). Good place to remember.
We had planned to see the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury but then Scott noticed that the planetarium show is only at 1:30 so we decided to go on Day 2, and go to the
Cabot Cheese factory instead. It was supposed to close at 4:00 so we hurried down a lot of slow roads (Exit 21 off 91, west on Route 2, north on Route 215, and THEN 5 more miles) and made it about 3:50. There were other late-comers and the staff very kindly showed us the 10 minute movie and gave us the factory tour anyway. They were making pepper jack cheese, and we got to see them adding peppers, stirring it into about two tons of cheese, shooting the cheese into a 3-story silo, smushing it into 40 lb bricks, and then seeing the bricks packed into boxes and put on a palette for aging. We ate a lot of the samples (beer-cheddar is new) and confirmed that we like the Seriously Sharp cheese the best, but that the others are good for a change of pace. And we bought a lot of stuff when the tour was over, since they were so kind as to let us stay.
It was dark and we hadn't made reservations anywhere. Scott thinks that makes a trip more exciting and usually we don't have the luxury. We ended up at
Branch Brook B&B in Lyndon, with Ann Tolman (which I had checked out on the Internet before the trip). We had a gorgeous room and a very gracious hostess.
Our hostess said White's Market was having a special on Cabot cheese -- 2 8-oz blocks for $3.00, so we stopped there before dinner and went a little nuts. Dinner was at
Trout River Brewing. Scott tried one of their new beers and wasn't crazy about it, but we really liked the thin crust pizza. The restaurant part is only open on Friday and Saturday nights.
DAY 2:
Breakfast was amazing, and people just don't have the dishes to set the table like that any more! With crisply ironed pink linen napkins to boot. New (to me) food idea: orange butter (butter, orange marmalade, orange rind) with orange scones.
The B&B had a lot of antiques, but also a lot of beautifully made cherry pieces that were new. They were made locally, by
Lyndon Furniture. We stopped at Stahler Furniture in Lyndonville to check out prices and options, and we had to see all 5 of the covered bridges before we left town. We forgot to go by where they make
Bag Balm: Dairy Association Co, Inc., for which I am truly bummed.
We were headed to Brownington, so Mrs. Tolman directed us by a great route that we would never have found by ourselves. Out of Lyndon Center, we went north on Darling Hill Road by
The Wildflower Inn and
The Inn at Mountain View Farm (good places to stay if you want to splurge, wildflowerinn.com and www.innmtnview.com), then north on 5A (you need a really good map for this part), along Lake Willoughby, left on 58, and to Brownington.
The
Old Stone House Museum (http://oldstonehousemuseum.org/) was having a holiday open house (read: free cookies and free admittance). We talked with a couple of people about how much the area had changed (lots of houses and people => few houses and people, for example), and about "the Reverend Alexander Twilight: scholar, husband, teacher, preacher, legislator, father-away-from-home to nearly 3,000 boys and girls, an African American and a Vermonter of great vision" and the first African American to graduate from college (Middlebury) in the U.S. [grb note: he was, at most, 1/4 Black]
Then we turned and headed south to Barton, VT. Barton, VT didn't show up on any of our "gee, you should stop here" lists, but we went to an antique store and Scott took pictures of the Barton Post Office and the Barton School.
We FORGOT to go to Glover to see the
Bread and Puppet Museum and the Cheap Art Shop (http://www.breadandpuppet.org/, 753 Heights Road, Glover, VT 05839, so I guess we'll have to go back.
We had a quick lunch at the
Miss Lyndonville Diner (686 Broad, Lyndonville, http://www.lyndonvermont.com/foodandent.html) since we were still full from breakfast and we needed to hurry to the Fairbanks Museum. We sat next to two old guys who eat there every day and have fun kidding with the waitresses.
The
Fairbanks Museum is in a great old building built specifically to hold this natural history collection, with two polar bears, a grizzly, a Kodiak, a couple of black bears, a moose, a water buffalo, and about a bazillion stuffed birds and other things.
We learned that in 1810, some guy brought 300 (600?) Merino sheep from Spain to Vermont and the wool industry took off. By 1840, there were 1.6 million sheep in Vermont, and by 1870 most of the sheep farming had moved west and the industry here was in decline. And by then, most of the hills and mountains in Vermont were in pasture, and the forests (and related wildlife) were nearly gone. (It reminded me of our trip to Ireland last spring!)
The guy who gave the planetarium show was a lot of fun, but it was dark, and warm, and I might have dozed off. Anyway, by the end of the show I was refreshed and ready to finish the museum and hit the road. (http://www.fairbanksmuseum.org/)
South of St. Johnsbury we took an easterly detour through Lower Waterford, as we had *briefly* considered staying at the
Rabbit Hill Inn (luxury rooms are $325 - $360, with two-person whirlpool tub and fireplace in the room, http://www.rabbithillinn.com/). Chris was right that this was one of the "most picturesque" villages in the NEK. We wandered south through New Hampshire to Barnet, VT, to get back on the highway (very good map needed again).
By this time it was 4 p.m. and starting to get dark. We enjoyed the drive south on Route 91 since it follows a ridge and has great views east over New Hampshire. We took Exit 7, and came home by way of Route 11 to Manchester. It was tempting to stop for dinner at the
lovely inn in Chester, but we were ready to come home.
Thanks to Tim and Jeanne for suggestions about the early part of the trip, to Jo for recommending the restaurant at Simon Pearce, and to Chris for all his great suggestions about the NE Kingdom! We did pretty well for a two-day vacation!
