The
next morning we checked out, our motel-drive-in experience having been everything
that I, at least, had hoped it would be. We ate a make-shift chicken sandwich
leftover from dinner (stored overnight in our fridge) in the car, and drove
further north in Vermont, toward the Ben and Jerry’s main store.
Today’s trip was much more
through touristy parts of Vermont--it was a different view of the state: more
scenic, less poor. Our first stop of the day was at Cold Hill Hollow Cider Mill,
just past the Ben and Jerry’s store. We sampled freshly made cider and
bought various maple and cider products: really excellent cider donuts, maple
sugar candy, a maple syrup sampler pack with different grades, maple applesauce,
maple sugar for baking, and maple mustard with horseradish. Robert declined
a cider slushee, possibly because we were on our way to an ice cream store.
Ben and Jerry’s was wonderful. At left, you see us near their cows; at
right, Christina with an old Ben and Jerry's bus. First of all, the place looked
exactly as it should: a big, colorful building on top of a hill, with cows (and
a cow-viewing area) on the way up the hill, lots of parking, and beautiful shades
of paint. We took a factory tour, along with a troup of Girl Scouts and some
families, and then sampled the two flavors of the day. We toured the gift shop,
buying a “Phish Food for People” tee-shirt for me. Robert wanted to
buy an extra-large “Chubby Hubby” tee shirt, and then tell people
that he was trying to grow into it, but they only had medium and small sized
“Chubby Hubby” tees. Robert helpfully told the check-out person that
that missed the entire point of a great flavor like “Chubby Hubby”
in the first place. We wandered outside to the scoop shop part and had a One
Sweet Whirled ice cream soda with vanilla syrup--I love 
ice
cream sodas, and an ice cream soda was the first-ever Ben and Jerry’s ice
cream product I had, the first summer of CTY at Skidmore in 1988. We carried
our soda over to some brightly colored Adirondack chairs and sat to eat it (Christina
at left). After posing for many pictures, admiring the giant milk tanks (Robert
below), and walking through the Flavor Graveyard of discontinued flavors (complete
with tombstones, inscribed with the flavor name and dates, and nice rhyming
epitaphs, something like, “Peanut butter chocolate chip cookie dough: Maybe
its name was a little too long; Maybe its taste was a little bit wrong; Mabye
it was just a little too rich; Its trouble, we’re sure, was finding a niche.”),
we got back in Norman and started driving south.
