Vacation #6: Site-seeing and Meet the Parents

After Becca and I finished work and cleaned up, it was time to show Tim a few things in the area...namely Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream.  Chuck and I had been there a couple of years ago with Becca and Joseph in winter.  This was different.  There were a lot of people everywhere.  They were standing in line, or shopping, or taking pictures, or eating, or on tours.  We were just a bit overwhelmed.

Chuck and Becca went to get us our tour tickets.  King Arthur Flour and Ben and Jerry's have a reciprocal agreement that would give Becca either free admission or a discount.  The girl at the ticket counter extended that to all four of us, so the tour was free, but we needed to wait a while.

We perused the gift shop for a while, and then walked outside a bit as well.  There were lots of picnic tables outside and people were seated at those picnic tables enjoying the ice cream they had waited in line to order.  We saw one family that seemed especially exuberant.  They had this large bucket of ice cream and all six of them had spoons and were laughing and chattering and digging in.  On the bucket was the word "Vermonster".  They looked like they were having a lot of fun.

The tour was OK.  We got a better tour a couple of years ago when there were not so many people there.  This one had interesting info, but not as much trivia.  At the end, of course, you get to taste ice cream.  The flavor of the day was  Late Night Snack, "vanilla bean ice cream with a salty caramel swirl and fudge covered potato chip clusters" and it is based on what people probably snack on while watching late night TV.  It was surprisingly good.  

After the tour we headed back outside to find the family with the bucket still at the picnic table, but not nearly so enthusiastic.  In fact one of the children was loudly saying, "This was a BAD idea!"  The Vermonster consists of 20 scoops of ice cream, 3 dippers of hot fudge, 4 bananas, 3 brownies, and cookies.  It must be more than a family of six can eat in one meal.

After Ben and Jerry's we headed for Cabot Cheese.  This is not a tour, but a store.  In the store is a long oval table with plates of tiny cubes of cheese set around the entire oval.  There are toothpick holders everywhere, as well as little used toothpick receptacles, and signs asking that you get a fresh toothpick for every taste you take.  We began to taste cheese.  Cabot cheese is pretty good cheese.  Tim's favorite was Muenster.  Mine was the sharpest cheddar they make.  We bought some of each to take along with us to NYC.

Then we went to the store next door which had chocolate, and free tastes.  It was excellent too, but even the reject bins of heart shaped chocolates proved a little to expensive for us.  

On to the apple cider place.  When Chuck and I had been here a couple of years ago we could watch the cider being pressed in a giant press, and we could buy cider, as well as any of thousands of other things in their big souvenir store.  But this trip was right before apple harvest season.  They were sold out of cider and they had no apples to press, so that was a pretty short stop.

In the evening, Joseph and Becca had arranged a dinner at one of their favorite restaurants, Jewel of India, near the Dartmouth campus.  Four of their good friends (Pat and Kaitlin, Alex and Amanda Ann) joined us and it was such a fun evening, full of good conversation and delicious food.  We were so full after the meal, and not yet ready to stop getting to know each other, so we went for a walk around the green at Dartmouth.  It was a great way to spend our last evening in White River Junction. 

Joseph, Becca and Mosley in their apartment

***I forgot to write about Newt's.  We went to Newt's right before closing on the day we swam in the Connecticut River.  Newt's is a walk up ice cream store that is only open in summer.  They have 28 flavors of soft serve ice cream.  They also have many flavors of scoop ice cream---amazing flavors.  It is so hard to choose what to order there that they have an option just for people who have a hard time deciding.  It is a mystery cone.  You get two dips of scoop ice cream and they choose the flavors (but you can rule out a couple that you know you won't enjoy). 

Then you sit outside and enjoy your ice cream, or if the weather isn't so nice, you sit in your car to enjoy your ice cream.  We sat outside and enjoyed the night air.

Tim was pretty hungry so he got a soft serve (something with coffee flavor in it) and a mystery cone.  I wish I could remember the names of the flavors I got because they were so amazing.  In fact, Chuck, who also got a soft serve, decided to get a single dip of one of my flavors after a little taste.  But the ice cream store is generous with their single dips.  Chuck took most of it back to Becca's house to put in the freezer for another day.