Day 3: A bird?! Where?
We didn’t bring an alarm clock with us on our trip but we really wanted to get up early this morning. The good news is that Richard found an alarm clock in his computer. The bad news is one of the children closed his computer last night, putting it to sleep. It was cloudy and raining this morning so there was no sunshine to wake us up, either. We ended up leaving the campground more than an hour behind schedule. But, everything turned out just fine. The drive was very relaxing as we listened to the rain hitting the windshield while looking at the mountains in the distance.
Richard and I had a bit of a, um, disagreement over navigation this morning. You see, I had printed directions from mapquest while he was relying on his new GPS program. Using his program, we’d gone north and south again and ended up only 20 minutes from where we’d left the campground an hour earlier. Richard had clicked for directions for trucks, which put us on the freeway, even though that route was way out of our way (not all back roads have bridges high enough to accommodate RVs). We still arrived at Rock of Ages Quarry in Graniteville, Vermont before lunchtime, so everything turned out just fine. We ate lunch in the RV while we waited for the next tour.
| MORE >> |
The tour was very interesting, and would have been more so if we’d been able to actually hear the young tour guide. People told him to speak up, but he seemed, well, he seemed like he was embarrassed to be speaking into that speaker. Here’s some of what we did get to hear. There are about 120 employees at the quarry, 40 of whom work in the actual quarry. The rest are in the offices and in the shop, carving memorials and other products. We were lucky today. Even though it was a Saturday, the quarry guys were working overtime to meet their quota. It takes about 6 weeks for them to cut a block of granite and get it out of the quarry, and they were lifting out a block while we were touring today. You can see a photo of the block below, along with others. According to the tour guide, the blue/green color of the quarry lakes is due to the algae feeding off the minerals in the silt they pump in there from the water they use when cutting.
Next stop was the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Factory in Waterbury, Vermont. Richard and I find stories of other entrepreneurs inspirational and we were kind of disappointed during the tour here to learn that Ben & Jerry sold out to a large corporation in 2000. But, we still had a pretty good time. It was very crowded. Watching the production area was kind of like watching those food factories they show on The Food Channel. They wouldn’t let us take photos inside the actual production area of the factory. Sorry. However, below is a photo of Max in the tasting room. Outside the factory, Max kept talking about a “bird over there.” We couldn’t quite figure out what he was talking about until Ali noticed a yellow fuzzy thing. See photo below. Max was right! It did indeed look like some sort of tropical bird! Click on the photo to see what it really was. And, no, that individual did not catch me taking his photo. Heh…
And, here’s something you don’t see everyday. Couldn’t resist getting a shot of this:
We went to a really nice restaurant, smokejacks, in Burlington, Vermont for dinner. If you go there, Max recommends the bread (which he’s feeding to his pet rock, “Rockie”, below) and Ali recommends the gigantic pork loin. I ordered the salmon and it was the best salmon I’ve ever eaten. Kinda pricey, but worth every penny. The third photo below is a outside the restaurant in Burlington.
We’re staying at a campground on Lake Champlain for the next two nights, and are taking the children to the beach tomorrow.