Autumn Colors

The next day at 8:00 am again, we headed out in the rain from North Conway New Hampshire to Woodstock, Vermont. It was a beautiful drive, even though rainy, through mostly farm country. We drove up through Pinkham Notch to Sugar Hill which is an adorable little town. From there we went to the town of Bath, New Hamphsire which is a teeny little town with America's oldest general store. It was built around 1800 and seems that some of the original merchandise is still there. A very fun and interesting little store with the best homemade pepperoni and smoked cheddar cheese I have ever tasted, along with all varieties of maple syrup, maple candy and everything else you can do with maple.

Lunch was in Hanover, New Hampshire which is the home of Dartmouth. Dartmouth is a very pretty, very old campus. Fun to see. It was "alumni weekend" there so finding a place to eat was a challenge. We finally sat at the bar in a restaurant where I had the best shrimp bisque ever. Still no Starbucks.

We drove into Woodstock and made a stop at Billings Farm which was an amazing thing to see even though I'm not much into museums and things. At least it is still a working farm and has prize jersey cows which produce some of the best cream and butter in the country. Some of their milk goes to Cabot to make one of my favorite cheeses. We saw them milk the cows and I went into the nursery and petted a calf. Al was amazed at the sophistication of the machinery and the running water they had to run that farm back in the days when none of that was available. It was definitely "state of the art" when it was built. In the original farm house they had the running water so they could churn butter in the basement. The more amazing feature to me was the closet off the master bedroom which was a walk-in and had built-in cabinets. Mind you, this was built around 1870 when I don't think people had enough clothes to fill a closet like that.

Then we were dropped of at the Woodstock Inn and Resort to stay in a room that is absolutely the best I have ever been in. 'They even had large screen flat panel tv's in the rooms. I could have stayed there several nights, but I'm afraid the cost of the trip would have gone up quite a bit. It was a most impressive hotel! The batteries in my camera died and I wasn't able to take any pictures of it.

Woodstock is a gorgeous little town with cute little shops. You got a sense that there is a lot of money there. I needed more time to see the shops even though there still was no Starbucks and no cell phone service. I would love to return to Woodstock.