Day 2 began sitting on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, with a nice hot cup of coffee, watching the sun rise through the window.
Once everyone else was up, we headed to Wally’s Place, a nearby bagel shop we had found. We grabbed breakfast and then also a dozen bagels to use for breakfasts for the rest of the week.
Our main plan for the day was to head to a pick-your-own orchard to pick some apples, so we headed out to Shelburne Orchard. The trees that were ripe that week were the Mcintoshes, and we filled a large bag with those, but then we saw the path towards the trees that had been ripe the week before, and managed to fill a small bag with the gleanings of Liberty apples and Asian pears.
Pleased with our bounty, we moved along to the shop area. We grabbed a snack of apple cider donuts and hot apple cider and sat to listen to the live music for a while. This orchard also has a distillery where they make their own apple brandy, and they had a tasting room, so after enjoying our ciders, we headed in there to see what they had, which turned out to be two ages of their apple brandy – I don’t remember the exact ages, something like 9 and 14? – a pear brandy, and pommeau, which is apple brandy mixed with cider and then aged a little longer. Two of us got flights of all four and we shared them around so we could all get a taste. Brandy’s not really my thing, but it was an interesting experience.
We headed out to the porch to taste our brandies, which is shared with the donut kitchen next door. None of us chose to use the Donut Salon Hair Dryer, though.
From the porch we could see a grass mound, which turned out to be their aging room, which was built to look like a hobbit hole. The interior of the building was off-limits, but we were able to go in through the gate and sign the guest book just outside the door.
Apple bounty in hand, we returned to the car and made our way to the Shelburne Museum, which we had passed on our way to the orchard. T had seen the museum during his research of the area, but hadn’t realised it was going to be so close to the orchard.
The Museum is made up of a couple dozen buildings, many of which were moved from their original locations to save them from being demolished. The exhibition I was most interested in was a Normal Rockwell exhibition, which included a few framed Saturday Evening Posts (it was two or three dozen, which I’m calling a few compared to the 300+ covers he did), some original art, some reference photos, and art by other New England artists of his time.
We spent two half days at the museum, which turned out to be far bigger than we’d originally anticipated, because a general admission ticket was good for two days.
The museum runs the gamut of historical artefacts from the area – tons of wagons, carriages, sleds and other horse-drawn vehicles; a working printshop with a variety of machines; a blacksmith shop – these last two make little trinkets and mementos for the museum shop; a weaving shop with a bunch of different looms (that was not in operation when we visited, I don’t know if this is ever manned like the previous two); and several buildings full of art by various artists, notably Monet, Manet, Desgas and Grandma Moses; a textiles building displaying smaller works like samplers and memorials and larger items like log cabin quilts; and other buildings just full to the brim of knickknacks, housewares, dolls, etc.
We had a snack at the museum cafe. I had a Creemee, which is apparently Vermont’s version of the soft serve ice cream. No offense to Vermont, but I didn’t really notice a difference to soft serve from other places. Though to be fair, the museum just had your basic vanilla and chocolate on offer. The next day, T got a maple and black raspberry swirl which was probably much more authentic to Vermont.
By this time, we were all worn out, so we headed back to the house and settled in for a relaxing evening. I took my turn to cook for the group and made potato-bacon soup, which we ate with some naan left over from the Nepali restaurant the night before, while T turned some of our apples into pies.
We finished off the night watching Shyamalan’s The Trap while we ate our soup and pie.
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