Today has been cold, wet, grey (gray?), and icky in Vermont, but that didn’t matter. The Long-Suffering Wife and I went out and touristed hard, as if we had never been here before.
Actually, while I spent my high school days living in Springfield, and we’ve had nearly a dozen trips back to Barre to see family, all of the places we visited today were places we had never been to before. Notably, despite having lived here for five years and then all of the visits to Barre, which is only about five miles from Montpelier, I had never visited or seen the state capitol building. This trip that had to change.
Here it is in all of its soggy glory. Note The Long-Suffering Wife with the blue & white umbrella trudging up the steps. I’m told that the Vermont capitol building is the smallest of all of the United States’ fifty state capitols. I don’t doubt it. I’ve seen the state capitol buildings in a dozen different states, and compared to someplace like Sacramento, Montpelier is tiny. But beautifully done.
The Representative’s Hall includes the original chandelier, rescued from the previous state house when it burned in 1857. Almost all of the interior of the state house is maintained and decorated as it was when built in 1859.
This chandelier was originally gas fired and is one of very few gas fixtures from that era remaining in existence. The huge plaster lotus blossom on the ceiling is made of petals each weighing 500 pounds. Good thing they don’t have (many) earthquakes here.
Driving around all day offered some very rustic, moody, and rainy views whenever the rains would let up and the clouds would lift a bit. We kept looking for deer, moose, and other wildlife, but only saw cows. There are a LOT of cows in Vermont.
Sometimes they do things a little odd in Vermont and I’ve always liked the sense of whimsy that you see in many places. For example, we took a tour of the Colby Creamery which processes milk and makes many kinds of cheese, sour cream, and other dairy products which are sold all over the eastern United States. On the tour, we saw this robot picking up packages of finished sour cream and cottage cheese, wrapping them, and stacking them on pallets. It’s the “robo-cow.”
There are many beautiful vistas to be seen in Vermont, but today was a day for seeing them only occasionally, through the clouds, often with wisps of fog and low clouds rolling through the valleys and over the ridges.
A different kind of beautiful, the weather being a much bigger factor than I’m used to in SoCal where the weather is the same 370 days a year.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 