$67.99 a Gallon

$67.99 a gallon.

Vermont.  Home of Maple syrup sugarhouses, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, the Green Mountains, and so much more.  We did it all, but our first order of business was to investigate why a gallon of Vermont Maple Syrup is $67.99.  And more curiously, who buys it by the gallon?

To get inside the heart of the production of Vermont's Maple syrup, we took a tour of a family owned Maple Syrup farm.  It was in the midst of the Green Mountains, and gorgeous in every direction.

Can you believe not even one of my children would pose for this picture.  They were delighted to take a pic of me, but they
are OVER having their pictures made!

Anyways, Morse Farm has been making Maple sugarworks for generations.  It's really neat to see all the members of the family pitching in on their business together.  They let us take a tour of their evaporation machinery where they boil all the sap down after they harvest it from the trees.  We also walked through the woods and saw how they tapped all the trees and how they've modified their sap collection process over time.  They even had a store where you could sample and buy their delicious products. 

At the beginning of our farm tour, we watched a VHS video on a VCR on an old TV in a woodshed.  This note was hanging under the TV.  It made us laugh.  The video is of Mr. Morse educating an audience of folks about the sap to syrup process.  He uses his "minor Vermont cuss words" every other word throughout the video.  He's a hoot.

The kids in front of the evaporation machine in the sugarhouse.  It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.

LAR inspecting the differences in the syrup depending upon when in the season the sap was harvested.

Inspecting all the places this tree had previously been tapped for sap.

Taste testing the various Maple treats.  We even had Maple ice cream.

In our opinion, Mr. Fix-It makes the world's best cake donut.  We purchased some pure Maple cream to use as a glaze for the donuts.  Oh my - I'm trying to get him to buy a food truck and take his Maple cream glazed cake donuts on the road.  They're terrific.

As if we hadn't ingested enough sugar, we decided to knock out another sugary factory tour that afternoon.  Enter, Ben & Jerry's.

This was taken after our tour.  Please notice CBR licking his elbow.  I didn't even think it was anatomically possible to lick your own elbow.  He just didn't want to miss even one single melted drop from his ice cream cone.

Of course, we sampled more sugar -- a new flavor they're developing in their test kitchen.  And, we bought some of our own.  As far as factory tours go, I'll be honest . . . this was a 5 out of 10.  Most are free, educational, and will toss you some freebies along the way.  Ben & Jerry's charged, a nominal fee, but a fee nonetheless, and the windows into the factory were poorly located.  It was difficult to get a good view of anything interesting.  But most disappointing was the freebie -- it was a teeny tiny, itsy bitsy cup of ice cream.  It only whet my appetite.  To get the real goods, you had to go out to the store and pay full price like any old commoner.  I want to feel like I'm on the inside track when I come to a factory tour.  Give me a huge bowl of ice cream and make me feel like I'm a backstage pass groupie.  Moreover, I could've gotten a better deal on their pints at the local grocery store than at their factory.  In Vermont, Ben & Jerry's was selling their pints of ice cream for half the price of what we'd normally pay in any other state. 

It's hard to beat their creamy flavor -- it's euphoric stuff.

Our RV park in Vermont was very close to Burlington, and hidden right on Lake Champlain.  We ate, shopped, and explored Burlington and found it to be a quaint town with a serious grunge/hippie vibe.  Lake Champlain sits right between the Green Mountains of Vermont, and the Adirondack Mountains of New York. 

Lake Champlain, Vermont.

This place was so beautiful.  Across from the lake was an awesome skate park.  I'm miserably untalented on a skateboard, so Mr. Fix-It and the kids spent every afternoon at the skate park.  By the end of the week, the kid's skateboarding skills made considerable improvements.  They loved it!

My personal driver dropping in on the half pipe.

CER taking the ramp on a rip-stick.  Translation:  triple the effort for speed and height.

Vermont.

 

My motley crew.  Lake Champlain in the background.



Our stay in Vermont was restful.  I like restful.  I like quiet.  The kids lost Billie Jean one day, and a neighbor in the RV park helped them get her home.  To thank the gentleman, the kids made him a loaf of banana bread and took it over to his "house." 

Coming home after delivering banana bread to the neighbor.

We went to church.  We usually do our best to find a church to visit in the area we're staying.  It's part of our experience, to be able to pop in and be a citizen for a day.  The children's class at the church we visited in Vermont left poor CBR in a quandary.  There was a little girl in his class at church who came dressed in some pretty extravagant goth make-up.  This child's entire face was powder white, and her eyes were all blacked in from the eyebrow all the way down to the cheekbone.  It was a most curious thing.  Her father was the preacher.  Apparently, her face make-up really spooked CBR.  When I picked him up from his class, he came out and burst into tears with his face hidden against me.  It took me a while to get it out of him, but apparently he'd been assigned to partner with this little girl in the spooky make-up & she shouted

at the teachers throughout the class.  He just didn't know what to think, and was scared.  It was a good opportunity to teach about the differences in people.

 

 One day, the girls felt bad for their brother because he didn't have any other boys to play with.  So, they devised a plan for him to have brothers for the day, instead of sisters.  They threw on ball caps, hid their girly hair up in the hats, and put on his boyish t-shirts.  They obliged CBR in all types of boyish games, played outside all afternoon getting dirty with him and playing rough.  He was so delighted with his "brothers."

 

My three sons.  For a day.

After the girls engaged in all things boyish for the sake of their brother, it was his turn to repay the favor.  LAR really wanted to tour the Vermont Teddy Bear Company's factory to see how their bears are made. 

 

Look at CBR. I understand the Vermont Teddy Bear factory was not his thing, but c'mon, he didn't have to pretend to be in a guillotine during the family photo.

 

It was a pretty interesting factory tour, full of "beary" punny jokes by our tour guide.

 

We chose to leave Vermont by ferry so that we could land directly in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.  That means we SQUEEZED our entire RV plus tow vehicle onto a ferry.  While we've taken several ferries this year, this was the first time we'd taken the RV on a ferry.  It felt liked we'd turned our rig into a yacht.  We're making lunch in our house and looking out at water all around us as we "sailed" across Lake Champlain.  Because we were the heaviest, we loaded first so they could center us on the ferry.

 

My personal driver, and his co-pilot Billie Jean to the far right, boarding the ferry.

Look how close we were to the side of the ferry!  Look how close the kids are to the windshield!

The kids were hanging out the window waving to me, and one lady started waving back to them, so the kids just kept waving . . . to everybody.  You'd think we were famous.

And then we set sail for our maiden voyage.

 

CBR manned the ship.  He pretended like one of the dash fans was the wheel at the helm of his ship.  He twisted it and turned it to avoid the crashing waves.  Eventually he broke the fan.

 





 

 

By the time our voyage was well underway, the notion of our "sail" had lost its luster and everyone went back to life as usual. I made lunch, the girls did school, and the boys prepped our vessel for arrival.

 



 

 

 

CBR sat at the helm throughout the voyage and brought us into port in New York.