Behind the high school with the Seahorse as a mascot is a beach park connected to Lake Champlain. You could tell they were getting ready for winter as the picnic tables were stacked under a pavilion. Out in the water a sailboat glided along the water. The beach was likely an artificial one. Nearby the remnants of a fire sat. This place probably was popular among locals durin the summer. However the onset of fall with he brutal cold of the winter was foreboding.

Next was on to Stowe by way of Smugglers Notch. And the word for the day was crowded. We were “leaf peepers,” or so the Days Inn sign said. We are in the peak season of this area of Vermont, with the fall colors bursting forth. And it seemed that everyone else was out too.

Next was Stowe and traffic jams. But this was the postcard town you see on Vermont travel brochures. I missed a turn to get into a picnic area and ended up doing a long detour. The picnic area had two very strange art installations. One was a bilboard stating “Are you here?” While another one seemed to be a silk screen t-shirt making booth with slogans like “Smiles without freedom” and “There is no sun without a song.”

Up the stairs I went to view the down. Nestled in between the tourist shops were (likely) multimillion dollar homes where people actually lived.

After lunch we craved Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, so on to the ice cream factory we went. Even with the factory tours cancelled until 2022, it was still crowded. We visited the Flavor Graveyard with funny tombstones of how and why they were discontinued.

The line to get ice cream was an hour long…and it seems that although Ben and Jerry are politically liberal, they’ve managed to embrace capitalism and making money. They managed to fool consumers that the ice cream at the factory was somehow better than the one at the store. So these visitors had no problem waiting an hour in the line.

Next was on to Ludlow to stay at the Timber Inn, a very quaint, family run hotel. Our hotel keys harkened back to yesteryear before scan cards were a thing. We had pizza from Ludlow Village Pizza before turning in for the night.