Before leaving Woodstock we took a quick detour to see the Billings Farm & Museum - Gateway to Vermont's Rural Heritage. We just didn't have enough time to take the $12 tour. The museum is run by the Woodstock Foundation, a charitable, nonprofit institution founded by Mary and Laurance Rockefeller. Yes the same Rockefellers of New York. (This was their summer place, cooler than the muggy big city in August.)"
So instead of the tour, Norm had a moment with the Jerseys. Cute girls aren't they?
Then off we went to Ottaquechee where we heard there were 450 vendors at an antique mall. There might have been that many but we left with nothing, not even one postcard. But on our way back we stopped to check out the Quechee Gorge. Now that was impressive!
The bridge crosses the Quechee river and we walked across to see just how far down it goes. Norm says it is about 400 feet.
We headed south to Weston, home of Vermont's Famous General Store. What a place! It goes on and on and on. You can find everything there. And the town is again so well maintained and beautiful.
This old water mill was built in 1780 and actually was a saw mill with a tinsmith sharing the building, as the sign says. There are many old buildings in Vermont, amazing how well some have lasted. We headed towards our final destination for the day, but on the way we stopped for coffee at Brandon. All along our travels we have seen the devastation done by Hurricane Irene last August. Roads were washed out, homes pushed off their foundations, and rivers overflowed their banks leaving trees, rocks and debris everywhere, but Brandon was something else.
This is a picture just a few feet off the main street, where a pizza joint used to stand. The force of all that water punched it out of the way and undermined the foundations of the brick building on the right, a tavern, now closed as big cracks opened up the masonry. Runoff spilled across the street and undercut the foundations of several more buildings, before flowing back into its usual channel. These 18th century towns across Vermont are vulnerable as the founders picked sites along streams and rivers to provide water power for early industry. Even neat and tidy Woodstock was still cleaning up flood messes from nine months ago and rebuilding the stream banks. Some bridges are still waiting for repairs.
Now it's Friday night and we are staying in Middlebury, another of town where the river runs through it, and a much bigger one than Brandon's stream. Middlebury used water power to saw marble into slabs for shipment via railway to the northeast's big cities. Stone is everywhere here, and many towns still use lengths of stone, not concrete, for curbs along the streets. We've even seen slabs of marble used for sidewalks in or two villages, odd-shaped leftovers that weren't good enough to ship to the cities.
We are staying at the Middlebury Inn, one of the historic hotels of America. It is within walking distance to town and when we arrived we got to have afternoon tea. Not quite the same level as the Empress. Here you help yourself to tea, coffee, cookies, lemon slice, coconut scones or brownies. But it was yummy at 5pm in the afternoon. Norm even got a HUG (hotel up grade) so we are in a suite, pretty nice. We then explored a bit of the town, had some American flatbread (pizza). Now to relax and see if we can find anything on the tv related to Canada.
Location:Middlebury
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