Going on the Ben & Jerry’s factory tour in Waterbury, Vermont, has been a longtime dream of mine (akin to seeing Old Faithful and the Grand Canyon), so it was very exciting to fulfill it today. We got to see them packing coffee ice cream, and we enjoyed a sample of exotic Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream at the end of the tour. Plus, we got to stand in a giant pint:

No photography allowed in the actual manufacturing & packing room, but I was allowed to snap through the window of the QC room:

Hooray!

Next, we ventured to Morse Farm Maple Sugarworks in Montpelier, Vt. It’s a working maple sugarhouse where they make maple syrup, sugar, creams, etc. We learned all about the sugaring process from a video we watched in the Woodshed Theatre:

Then we got to wander around and look at equipment and buy things (they weren’t making syrup or anything today; the sugaring season is really, really short and it’s still too warm at this point). We had some delicious maple ice cream and a tasting of all four maple syrup grades!

For some reason, I apparently forgot to take photos of all the sugaring equipment and stuff, but never fear because our next destination was also maple-related! It was the Maple Grove Farms maple candy plant in St. Johnsbury, Vt., and they had sugaring equipment there, too, so I got some pictures there and can explain it. Traditionally, maple trees were tapped and fitted with a little spout and a bucket to catch the sap like this:

Nowadays, though, most producers use a more modern setup involving plastic tubing. This saves them a lot of work moving the sap around. By the way, the tree decides how much sap it’s going to yield, and this depends on the temperatures and such; you can’t force the tree to produce more sap than it’s going to do naturally. The sap comes out very slowly (for example, it would take half a day to a full day to fill a typical bucket like the one above, depending on the age of the tree and the temps), and it takes 35 to 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of maple syrup!

Once extracted, the sap is placed in an evaporator like this one:

The stove part is below (a wood fire burns behind the doors you see at the bottom), and the sap is poured into the trays above and boiled down into syrup.

Maple Grove Farms’ main gig is making maple candy. They get the syrup from local farms and then basically just whip it up into fondant on vintage equipment (all their equipment is vintage); the fondant gets poured into molds, the molds are left to dry overnight, then the candy gets shaken out by hand. After that it is dipped into a vat of maple syrup here:

This forms a crust on the outside of the candy that acts as a natural preservative. Nice! Then the candy is packed by hand and sold. They also make a bunch of bottled products. They weren’t making candy anymore by the time we got there today (around 1:00 or 1:30), but we still had an interesting little tour.

After that, we headed up to Cabot, Vt., to visit the Cabot cheese plant!

This was especially interesting in light of my new cheese knowledge. They make their cheese at Cabot the same way we did at Ricki’s yesterday except (obviously) it’s on a much, much larger scale. Here they are breaking up their curds!

After Cabot, we went back to St. Johnsbury (we had to zigzag a bit today because of the various factories’ tour hours!) so we could go to the Dog Chapel. I think many of you are familiar with artist Stephen Huneck; I have a vague memory of seeing his work in a gallery or shop or something in Annapolis — maybe on State Circle?? He does all this work involving dogs:

So, when I saw a brochure for the Dog Chapel in Vermont and figured out it was also a gallery, I wanted to go check it out. The chapel is a little New England church–shaped building, but instead of the usual religious symbols all around, it has dogs (like the dog angel on top of the chapel):

But I was totally unprepared for the inside. It has dog (and a few cat) sculptures all around and pews with dogs carved into them, but more importantly, there are small pieces of paper and thumbtacks, and the walls are covered with photos, notes, and memorials visitors have written for their dearly departed dogs.

It was, as you can imagine, completely overwhelming and amazing and touching and sad and wonderful. Luckily, there are boxes of Kleenex around. This was just so unexpected but really good and special.

After we picked ourselves up and recovered from that experience, we headed east into New Hampshire!

We didn’t linger in New Hampshire very much, though, because we were trying to get into Maine before it got too dark so we could get a picture of the Maine welcome sign. When we crossed over into Maine, it had gotten pretty dark, and we had to pull over so I could get this fine photograph:

No welcome sign in Maine, apparently. Someone else had pulled over nearby, and we couldn’t figure out why, but then Brian spotted the enormous moose standing right by the side of the road!!! OMG! He was much closer than our previous moose friends, and I guess I already knew the moose was a large animal, but um… he was really big. And I don’t think he was a huge fan of people staring at him, to be honest with you. Because of the lack of light, it was very challenging to get a photo, but Brian did manage to get this one!

I can’t believe we’ve now had two random moose sightings. Thanks, Maine!