Montpelier, VT

Remember back in the Albany post how I told you I had several State Capitol Building posts to do? Montpelier is number two of four.

Vermont has the smallest State Capitol City. It’s tiny. The dome you see on the building is covered with 23.7 carat gold leaf. I had high hopes for this building. It looked so promising from the outside.

I’ve got three pictures to show you of the Vermont State Capitol Building and one of them is a picture of the floor. In the lobby, the floor is made of marble. The white tiles are from Danby, Vt and the black tiles are from Isle La Motte on Lake Champlain. All through the building you can see fossils from the Chazy Fossil Reef. We loved that!

We took the guided tour and saw the Senate Chamber, Representatives’ Hall, and even the Governor’s Office. It was all nice and tidy…and needing some work. There wasn’t anything opulent. It was, in fact, all very modest. In the Reception Room we saw two stained glass skylights. They were both lovely. I’m afraid that’s all I have to tell you about the Vermont State Capitol Building. After seeing the grandeur of the New York State Capitol Building…the Vermont SCB was a little disappointing. I was looking forward to the dome, but we didn’t get to see it because it’s been deemed unsafe. What a bummer.

When you think of Vermont, what comes to mind? Maple syrup and dairy, right? We found a place called Morse Farm Maple Sugarworks to explore the maple syrup making process.

You can walk around and look at where they get their maple. It all starts with the trees. They call early spring “sugarin’ time”. One tap hole can produce up to fifteen gallons of sap each season. Since it takes forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, it takes up to three trees to make a gallon of finished syrup.

Once they’ve collected the sap they run it through a reverse osmosis then it goes into the machine you see above. The whole point is to get as much of the water out of the syrup as possible and bring it to a specific temperature. Interesting fact…way back when Vermonters started working with maple, they actually cooked it longer and made a sugar out of it. When the white cane sugar we all know became popular, the people of Vermont decided to start making maple syrup instead of maple sugar.

Think that stuff you poor over your pancakes every morning is maple syrup? You should check the ingredients. More often than not it’s actually corn syrup flavored to taste like maple syrup.

It’s known as creemee in Vermont, but the rest of the country knows it as soft serve ice cream. At Morse Farm they add maple syrup to their creemee and it is magical! We all got treats. Littlest had the Maple Popcorn Sundae.

We found a Ben & Jerry’s Factory to take care of the dairy part of what Vermont is known for. There’s a guided tour that takes you right by the factory where they’re making the ice cream. Be prepared…I snuck a shot just for y’all…

Oh dang…you can’t really see anything. *giggle* We weren’t supposed to take photos of the factory. The guide said something about corporate secrets…honestly, you can see everything you would want to see from the picture above. I’m not sure what secrets they were worried about leaking. It looked amazingly like any other food factory floor.

They took us down to the original flavor lab. This is the place where Ben & Jerry used to make all of their flavors.

And then they give you a free scoop of the flavor of the day. For us it was Triple Caramel Chunk. Yummo!

And…of course, we had to visit the scoop shop on our way out even though we’d just had some free ice cream!

I forgot to tell you about the Flavor Graveyard where you can stroll through the “graves” of the flavors that have been discontinued. It was a fun tour with a tasty ending!

We only spent a week in Vermont, but we will definitely go back! Beautiful countryside, and a foodie’s paradise…Vermont has some hidden treasures.

See y’all down the road!

#easternloop2016