Leaf-peeping in Vermont

Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Mon 15 Oct 2012 22:44
After a truly awful night on Saturday, we set off early Sunday morning.  The wind had, as forecast, started to howl about midnight, and forgot to stop, keeping us awake as the boat was rolling and snatching on her lines, and the halyards of the nearby boats were clanking, who says we have an easy life? Having eventually given up trying to sleep, we ended up retying lines and adjusting fenders at 6am! 
We had planned to leave at 8am but with the extra messing round it was closer to 9am.  The weather started out pleasant, and we drove north through Connecticut, up to Massachusetts and onto Woodstock, in Vermont. We had been chatting to our neighbours on Saturday and they had recommended a stop in Woodstock and Manchester.  
After this trip I now know why, when you ask an American where they live, they always tell you the town and the state they are from - all the town names are repeated in just about every state, making navigation somewhat confusing.  We passed at least 3 towns named Manchester!  The drive up was very scenic, the trees were very colourful, but the leaves got sparser as we got further north.  This is not just due to the cold, more to do with the height above sea level, so as we returned south and were on the way back to Mystic, the colours came back.  We passed through some very pretty areas, with few houses and fewer cars and people, some towns are just a cluster of 4/5 homes, hamlets really, and are quite widely spaced out. 

image/jpg

 On of the 'famous' covered bridges

image/jpg

 Some wet New England foliage

image/jpg

 All of the houses and some of the towns have Fall decorations - can you spot the impostor in this shot?
 
Woodstock was charming, if a little wet by the time we arrived, and very cold.  Finding a reasonably priced B&B proved more difficult than we had expected.  As fall is such a big deal, it is still full season prices here and some of the B&B's started at $250 per night and went up - ouch!!  We managed to steal some wifi from the car park of a dodgy looking motel and eventually found somewhere to stay in town.  After checking in and being asked if we had any food allergies etc, we set off exploring.  Despite it being a cold wet Sunday afternoon, the shops were all open and we browsed around, spending ages in the Country Store until we got too cold and heading into a bar for some madly alcoholic  hot apple juice - the glass was at least half full of spiced rum and just topped up with hot apple juice!  The Country Store was a great place and sold everything you could possibly need, and seemed to go on for ever with small rooms going off in all directions.  After staggering back to the B&B, we had a short snooze, passed out actually, and then went out for a spot of dinner.  
Breakfast the next day was something of a shock.  You expect a treat from B&B breakfasts, home cooked bacon, eggs, toast, the whole works, imagine our horror when what we actually got was sweetened fruit salad, with a huge dollop of cream, three wedges of sugar and cinnamon coated 'french toast', and sausages - all on the same plate, with a pitcher of warned maple syrup to pour over! It was truly the most disgusting meal I have ever been served, totally gross, and a huge waste as on the table of 6 people that we sat at, most of the food went back barely touched.
Anyway, after a disappointing start to the day, it was off to Woodstock's premier tourist attraction, a farm!  This is however no ordinary farm, it was credited with changing the face of Vermont farming from relying solely on crops, to raising animals as well.  The farmer at the time imported Jersey cows, as well as Berkshire pigs and an English breed of sheep, all of which are still farmed there today. In addition they used English-bred draft horses to work the land.  The trip was quite educational, we found out what an ox is for a start.  I thought it was a type of animal, but actually it is a male bull, that has been castrated soon after birth and trained for 4 years to work in a yoke and pull farm machinery etc. We saw the newborn calfs in the nursery, they were males which are basically valueless, and kept for meat only, whereas the females are worth up to $10,000 each.  Also we found out all we ever needed to know about pumpkins and squashes at the pumpkin talk! Amazingly, the record for the largest pumpkin grown was recently broken and now stands at over 2000lbs, imagine the size of that!!  These special pumpkins are nurtured and cosseted to ensure maximum growth and are usually fed intravenously with milk, oddly enough, to allow them to grow at a rate of about 40-50lbs per day - you can practically see it grow!  One thing they use these huge pumpkins for is 'pumpkin raft-racing', how mad is that - they hollow them out & even put sails on them and everything!  The fact that they are round however, has a somewhat interesting affect on the ability to steer them, and they are also very wobbly!!
What was also interesting is that if two different types of pumpkins on two different vines cross-pollinate, which happens regularly, you get a whole new type, there are loads of different ones now, some of which are very ugly and not very appetising to look at!

image/jpg

 Pumpkins!

image/jpg

 Oxen

image/jpg

 Me with a 2 day old baby calf - how cute is he??

Our next stop was the Vermont Country Store.  This is a huge, now very touristy version of the store in Woodstock, practically in the middle of nowhere, again selling everything you didn't know you needed, from underwear, huge unflattering styles for males and females, and nightwear of the floral, full length, flannelette sort, to animal feed.  Here they again have the artisan food store which is great as you can sample everything, from cheeses, (another thing Vermont is famous for), to jams, dips, cooked meats etc, we sampled so much we missed lunch!

image/jpg


The last place we went to was Manchester, a supposedly picture perfect village, but by this time it has started to pour down, so we decided not to stop, but to head directly to the hotel in West Dover where were staying for the night - easier said than done.  This was the one time we got lost, but luckily we ended up exactly where we started (although an hour later!) and, instead of hitting the more scenic back roads, kept to the main roads instead.  The hotel was comfortable, with great food in the middle of Vermont's ski area, and the fact we had got a great  deal on the internet and hadn't paid full price made it better still.  That night's food surprise came at the start of the meal.  I had buttered my piece of bread and when I bit into it I thought, mmmm this tastes a bit weird - then i realised they had whipped maple syrup into the butter?!!!
On Tuesday we woke up to sunshine and bitterly cold weather, did I mention they have had their first inch of snow here already this year?? The big attraction nearby was the Shelburne Bridge of Flowers, well,  I am sure it looked better a weeks or so ago in full bloom, thats all I can say about it!  It was so cold we had a very quick walk but couldn't even find a coffee shop open to get warm so got back in the car very quickly and headed home.  We found a great local cafe for brunch, again in the middle of nowhere, really typical American, full of locals, great fresh food and very cheap.  In the afternoon we stopped for a walk at Pittsfield, a really odd town, but they did have a British food shop and we got tins of Heinz beans, (all baked beans here seem to have added sugar, molasses or maple syrup), proper english golden syrup for our porridge and Cadbury's chocolate.  We found out why the stuff you can get in America that says it is Cadbury's tastes all wrong - it is made under licence by Hershey's, and their chocolate sucks!!

image/jpg

 Shelburne's famous Bridge of Flowers - not actually that exciting!!

image/jpg

 John looking very cold!!!!