Montpelier, VT

Armed with my DSLR camera dangling from my neck, and a VISA card that has to be full by now, I and my cousin, aunt, uncle and two interesting family friends set out for some hardcore sight seeing. I needed to get my sister and mum a birthday present too, so I was trying to buy any interesting looking tourist tat I could find.

We first went out to the Cabot cheese place just up the road, which had lots of free samples to stuff your face taste. I decided the 50% fat and other lighter cheeses were quite tasteless, but once we got around to the aged cheddar and the one with the habanero chillis in the cheese became tasty and much more pleasant to eat.

After that we went to the Ben & Jerry’s factory down the road, which claims to be the first of their factories ever built, and where it all started. The tour was the usual corporate cattle-hearding, but it was cheap and the tour guide had a suitably sarcastic sense of humour – “I’ll leave you to watch this video. Sorry, it’s just corporate brainwashing, but you know, sit back and go woo”, “In this section you’re not allowed to take photos. No idea what’ll happen if you do, maybe you’ll go to Guantanamo or something”. The free sample at the end was nice and proved you can have a fairly nice free meal if cheese and ice cream are your thing.

Montpelier state house

After that we drove into Montpelier, the capital of Vermont (and pronounced in a totally different way to the French place of the same name). This is a nice traditional looking town, full of traditional American town buildings and streets. The capital building was interesting to walk around, and that in itself was surprising, that you could just open the door, wander in and so long as you stayed your side of the red velvet barrier, and didn’t open any doors, everything was fine. I don’t think you can wander about our government buildings so easily.

For dinner we had crepes, but not the French style ones, these were savoury and pretty good. I might try and make some when I go home.

On the way back from parading around Montpelier taking photos of everything we stopped off at Morse Farm maple sugarworks where I discovered I like the B-grade dark syrup more than the best quality stuff. According to some more tourist video we consumed, the B-grade stuff is mostly used for cooking, but there you go it takes 40 gallons of maple tree juice to make 1 gallon of maple syrup, which explained why the 1 gallon bottles of it cost over $60.

I can’t decide now whether to sit around and read, or to go and lie in the hot tub outside. It’s such a hard life being on holiday