Events of Friday, October 1, 2010 

          Happy Birthday Grandpa! Today, our Grandpa, on my dad’s side, turned 74 years young! In celebration of our Grandpa’s birthday, Daddy got us sugary cereal. This might seem weird to some people, but we don’t get Froot Loops, Corn Flakes, Apple Jacks, Cocoa Krispies, Honey Smacks, and all of your other sugary cereals every day. In fact, we don’t even get it once a month. Once in a while, we might have the treat of Quaker Oatmeal Squares, but that’s pretty much it. We usually have real healthy cereals, which we like, but we always love the treat of sugary cereals and hot breakfasts. So this morning we awoke to sugary cereals, a treat for the sane people of the family, and gravel, a.k.a. Grape Nuts, a treat for those other insane members of our family. Although sometimes I belong to the latter, today I had to be sane, because how could I resist extreme sugar? Ben and Daddy, the masculine people in the family, had gravel, but everyone else started with sugar and maybe filled their stomach later with something more substantial.

          After breakfast we left the Walmart we had slept at, and drove on a scenic route toward a wildflower farm and a Costco. While planning for our trip to Vermont, Daddy said that a wildflower farm was an extreme oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp, Microsoft Works, and government intelligence. (It is okay if you don’t get this joke, it took me quite a while) On this scenic route we saw a lot of fall foliage and flooding. It has rained quite often and hard recently, and there are flood warnings everywhere. Even a section of Highway 116 was closed due to flooding, and we took a nice little detour by a river which we thought was supposed to be much smaller, considering there were trees in the middle of the river and their tops were barely visible. Trying to get back on to Highway 116, we drove through a small town called Bristol. Lately, we have been frantically looking for a post office to mail post cards and a surprise that I got for my Uncle Scott. Mom has been searching too, and said that if we saw one, we should yell “STOP!” and then we would come to a screeching halt. Quite set on trying out this technique, I was on the alert as we drove down a quaint country road. Suddenly I saw a post office off to the right, and yelled STOP as I had been instructed. There was a detail however that we forgot to work into our plan. It is VERY hard to stop the RV on short notice. It is especially hard to stop in the rain. So it took Mom a little while to react and by then we were past the post office. So she stopped, but found that we could not turn around there, so we turned around in a parking lot around the corner, and then parked across the street. We mailed everything; got some more stamps, and then we were on our way. As we left, Dad noticed men on the roof pushing of great puddles of water off the flat roof of the post office. Not something you see every day, especially in California.

          We arrived at the wildflower farm, but found it closed due to power loss. Did I mention that it has been raining the entire time we’ve been in Vermont? Nonetheless, we had a beautiful view of a meadow full of wildflowers to have lunch by. After a scrumptious lunch, we drove towards a Costco in Colchester and bought many necessities for life in the RV. We found it amusing that, advertised in the food court was Italian sausage sandwich, which Mom said was an East Coast specialty. The picture of it had sautéed peppers and onions on a delicious looking sausage in a bun. Unfortunately, we had just had lunch, and did not plan on having dinner for quite a while. As a result, we decided to wait to try this specialty until another Costco on the East Coast.

          We left Colchester after a fun experience of putting groceries away in the rain, and drove towards Waterbury. We had learned that the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream factory was located in Waterbury. This place of tours, samples and a scoop shop was definitely not to be missed. As we drove up, I immediately fell in love with the place. The building was painted light blue with clouds, as in their logo. Just to remind you, their logo is a scene with black and white cows on bright green hills with a blue sky and clouds behind it and Ben & Jerry’s written in a fun font. In front of the building were cow statues and some examples of old ice cream trucks. It even included a replica of the original ice cream truck – the one that burned down. But I’ll tell you more about that later. Dad, Mom, and I went in to use the restroom and reserve tickets for the 4:00 tour. While using the restroom, I discovered the Men and Women signs were very creative. Do you know the usual man and woman depicted on the bathroom sign? Here, the man and woman were standing on a green hill with blue sky and clouds behind it. One arm was put up and was holding and ice cream cone. I noticed that the man’s ice cream cone had a drip and a bite out of it, but the women’s ice cream cone was immaculate. Going inside the restroom, I found that the water in the toilets was blue, and it had a cute little rhyme on the wall about how it was reused water. Walking out of the bathroom, I realized I loved this place with its good ice cream, and funny signs, walls, movies, people, and even ice cream flavors, and I prepared to have an enjoyable afternoon.

          After reserving spots on the 4:00 tour, we went back to the RV and read for half an hour. We went in at 4:00 just in time for to hear a cow bell ring, and our tour began. We went upstairs, or if you couldn’t climb stairs you could take the “vanillavator”, for a moo-vie, and learned a lot about the history of Ben & Jerry’s. Supposedly, Ben and Jerry met in elementary school, and were basically the fat boys who lagged behind the rest of the PE class on the track. It was during this excursion that the two met and became best friends. When it came to college, one couldn’t get into any medical schools and the other got into colleges, but kept on dropping out. Finally, they decided that college was not for them. Together, they took a five dollar correspondence course from Penn State. They wanted to start their own business, and chose ice cream, only because an ice cream machine was cheaper than a bagel machine. And so, they began to start to make ice cream. They started their ice cream store in a gas station. Its original name was Ben & Jerry’s Homemade. Wanting to advertise their store a bit, Ben and Jerry drove a van packed with ice cream across the country, giving out free ice cream. When the van was one-third of the way across the country, the van caught on fire and burned to the ground, the world’s largest Baked Alaska. After this trip, Ben and Jerry created the idea of free cone day in order to give back to the community, a tradition that continues to this day. After the moo-vie, we saw where the ice cream was made and learned about the making of ice cream. Then we went downstairs and received samples of Milk & Cookies, one of their new flavors. It tasted a lot like cookies and cream, except much better.

          Enticed by this sample, we wanted more. So we went to the scoop shop and got an array of six scoops, all different flavors. The flavors we got were: Maple Blondie, Sweet Cream and Cookies, New York Super Fudge Chunk, Chocolate Therapy, Coconut Seven Layer Cake, and Half-Baked. All were delicious, but Mom liked Chocolate Therapy the best. This is no wonder, for Chocolate Therapy was like supreme chocolate ice cream. It was very rich and, well, chocolatey. We left the building and went to the Flavor Graveyard. This is where they “bury” flavors that are used any more. Some were not successful, but others were too successful. Each little tombstone had the flavor’s name and a poem, many of which were quite amusing. Savoring the taste of ice cream in our mouths, we sadly left Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Factory for our campsite. At our campsite, Mom made dinner, and we had a lovely meal of spaghetti, garlic bread, and, in celebration of Grandpa’s birthday, chocolate cake. With full tummies, we went to bed after an extremely fun day.