From Thursday, May 31

There is much to catch up on as we have done much since our last blog! From around Burlington, VT, we headed east along I-89 to Waterbury. There we visited the Green Mountain’s Coffee Roasting Co. where we learned about our ‘coffee personalities’. It came as no surprise that Shuwen’s “practical and no nonsense”, but somehow Marc got “wild and adventurous”. Anyway, we got some great coffee there :) What a great way to start off the day. Also in Waterbury, VT, is the first Ben & Jerry’s Factory! We took a tour of the place which provided some campy fun and a sample of on of their newest ice-creams: Crème Brulee. Marc does not think it will do well. The other new flavors of the year like Willie Nelson’s Peach Cobbler sounds promising though!

Next, we stopped in Montpelier, the capital of VT which has a mix of archetictural styles. It’s like they couldn’t decided between whether they wanted to be Frenchie or American. Apparently the guy who named some of the towns around Vermont really liked French names, but unfortunately Americans can’t pronounce Calais the way it’s meant to be pronounced and it sounds rather unfortunate and painful (excuse the pun).

We headed south along I-93 and entered New Hampshire around 2:30pm, and found a campsite in the Franconia Notch State Park (a lady we met in Grand Isles had told us about it). Along the way we were looking out for the Old Man of the Mountain, which was a rock formation that looked like the facial profile of an old man. We did drive by an “Old Man of the Mountain Historic Site”, but did not see the “Old Man of the Mountain viewing spot” as written about in our guide books. When we registered at the campsite, we discovered to our great sadness that the Old Man of the Mountain had fallen on May 3rd, 2003!! Our guidebooks were 1999 and 2002 versions and so missed that information. That explained the “historical site”!
At any rate, we set up camp at the Lafayette campgrounds and then headed south a little bit more to see the Flume gorge. The Flume was created by a crack in the earth’s crust that was filled by molten lava. Over time the lava eroded away and left this gorge with wonderful rapids and waterfalls. The hike up and around the Flume, was about 2-miles and some amazing trees and glacial boulders along it. We were starving by the time we made it back to the campsite.