Weekend in New England - (II)

Today was quite an eventful day (good). We started off fairly early in the morning and drove to Stowe, the home of the Von Trapp family after they Climbed the Mountain. (Just feel like singing those Sound of Music Numbers.) Apparently it reminded them of their native Austria and I guess you do get a little bit of that feeling. There were other signs that other migrants from the alpine region settled in Stowe - the Swiss cafe would be a give away for a start. Think that this house depicted here has a slightly European feel? Also saw a Catholic church. We drove a little further around the area but did not really get many great views thanks to the lousy weather.

After that, we visited Vermont's finest - Ben and Jerry's. There was unfortunately no ice cream production (factory closes on weekends) but we did go for the tour and the B&J video show. The founders have actually sold off the company to Unilever and are now doing the more "social mission" aspects of the B&J organisation. There was also a free ice cream sample of "American Pie" - turned out to be apple pie ice cream.

We then drove back to Montpelier for lunch. The interesting thing I noticed about Montpelier this time was that there seemed to be a concentration of 3-4 churches in one particular area - all different denominations. Seemed to be a certain amount of, ahem, friendly competition? Could not find the Catholic church though.

We then drove down to St Johnsbury - but there was nothing much to see. Except that on the main street, again the "battle of the churches" was going on again with 4 churches on the same short stretch. This time, I spotted the Catholic church of St John the Evangelist - very appropriate for a place called St Johnsbury (apparently the "bury" was added because they thought "St John's" was too common a name.

We then proceeded to New Hampshire, to go through the Franconia area in the White Mountain region. At this point, the weather amazingly improved. Instead of clouds, we started getting sunshine! We drove down to see Echo Lake and take the Tramway up Cannon Mountain. The ride up the mountain was wonderful - the photo shows Echo Lake (its a glacial lake) at the bottom of the mountain, with the trees changing colour around it and I believe Vermont is in the distance. We didn't stay too long at the top of the mountain as we had to rush over to our last stop - Flume Gorge.

Flume Gorge is an absolutely gorgeous, hidden valley. Someone literally stumbled across it sometime in the 1800s. It was formed through glacial action but sometime before that there was apparently some volcanic action so there are orange lava strips embedded in the black granite. After walking through the gorge, we end up at the waterfall. Unfortunately we were unable to walk further around the region as we had to head back to Boston. And that's the end of this post!

p.s. To see more New Hampshire photos click here.