New England Trip (day 1)

When we lived in Virginia I always wanted to drive up to Boston and the rest of New England, but it didn't happen. I just assumed, now that we live 2,500 miles away, it never would. So in September when Dan mentioned that one of Brower Timing's distributors wanted him to fly out to Vermont for a meeting, I jumped right on that idea. Lorna agreed to watch Alta and Ellie so Olive and I could tag along.

We flew out of Salt Lake on the first Thursday of October. Despite how well-behaved Olive was, 5 1/2 hours on a plane with a baby is never very fun. But we made it into Boston, picked up our rental car, and got to our hotel at 2am on Friday morning.

We had a couple hours of driving ahead of us to make it to Dan's first meeting, so we got up as early as we could on Friday and drove through Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and into Vermont. It was very similar to Virginia, except even more trees. And as we got into New Hampshire and Vermont, I was very surprised at how empty it felt! We rarely saw buildings, houses, even gas stations.

The last 10 miles of the drive on a small side road to the distributor's office was one of my favorite parts of our trip. It was unbelievably beautiful! The road ran along the Connecticut River and the trees were starting to show their fall colors. I didn't even take pictures; I could never capture what it felt like to be there!

I dropped Dan off and drove back along that stretch of road to King Arthur Flour:

This is another place I've wanted to visit but never thought it would happen, so I was pretty excited when I was planning our trip to find out it was 15 minutes away from Dan's meeting! They have a store, a cafe and bakery, and windows where you can watch the bakers making breads and pastries. Olive and I spent the whole morning there:

 I got a chocolate croissant and raspberry tart to munch on. They were so good:

 Dan called when he was finished and we headed back to pick him up. The distributor's building:

 Right next to an cool old railroad station:

We decided to go back to KAF for lunch, where Dan made me pose:

 We ordered some seriously good sandwiches, and Dan bought a baguette for the car (the best baguette I've ever had in the US)

 Dan mentioned he wanted to see Dartmouth, which turned out to be a 3 minute drive. It was exactly what I imagined a New England ivy league school would feel like - quiet, beautiful, and small. I only got pictures out the car window, but I loved this tree:

 And all the old buildings and churches:

The rest of the day was spent driving ALL over the state. One of the guys that Dan had met with that morning gave us a route to drive to see fall colors and experience Vermont. And here's the thing: whenever I've thought about Vermont in the past, I've pictured rolling hills covered with trees, gorgeous colors, traditional barns with green roofs, and old white-steepled churches. In the back of my head I assumed that it couldn't really be like that, there had to be some typical boring, overly-developed areas. But there wasn't. It turns out Vermont really is trees, rolling hills, farms, trees, beautiful old buildings, quaint towns, and more trees. It was incredible.

We drove towards Woodstock (one of the more well-known quaint towns) and on the way had to slow for lots of pedestrians crossing the two-lane highway near a big bridge. I looked over the bridge to see what the deal was, and looked down into a big gorge:

 We pulled off the road and got out to walk around. We found out it was called Quechee Gorge, and is also known as Vermont's "little grand canyon". In terms of impressive geological features, you just can't compare the East to what we have out west, but with the trees and colors it was quite beautiful. Dan liked the bridge:

 The view from the other side:

 We didn't have time to hike to a spot to take a good picture, so I took this off the internet: (that's the bridge we were driving across when I looked over to see what everyone was looking at)

Vermont has more authentic covered bridges than any other state (apparently this is a big deal to some people; they are quite picturesque) so I had to get a photo of one of them:

After driving and driving, and then somehow taking a wrong turn, we had to skip the Joseph Smith monument at his birthplace and head straight to Ben & Jerry's. We got there just in time for the last tour. They weren't making ice cream that day which was kind of disappointing, but we still got to see the factory and get our delicious samples at the end:

 And then decided to get even more ice cream, because why not? Olive was happy about it:

 It was getting late so we headed back in the general direction of Boston. Dan needed a shoe insert because he had bruised his heal the day before we left, so we tried to find a Target (not a single one in Vermont) or Walmart (a couple in the state but not near us) and finally found some big name stores when we crossed the state line into New Hampshire. Seriously, being in Vermont was like being in our own little world. I loved it.

And then we almost ran out of gas because there were no gas stations. In Massachussets. Just outside a major metropolitan area. This place is crazy!

And to end Day 1, Señor Olive eating prunes at Panera:

The prunes because she was having all sorts of issues, and Panera because it was like reliving our Virginia days. We found a hotel about an hour outside of Boston and got a few hours of sleep before another full day - coming next!