{"id":2356,"date":"2026-10-17T14:51:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T20:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kruthie.me\/blog\/?p=2356"},"modified":"2026-10-21T07:20:54","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T13:20:54","slug":"vermont-2026-day-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.karenrsavage.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/17\/vermont-2026-day-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Vermont 2026 – Day 2"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Colchester Reef Lighthouse<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Ticonderoga Steamboat<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Puzzle tile flooring on the Ticonderoga<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We finished off the night watching Shyamalan’s The Trap while we ate our soup and pie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[321,9,410],"tags":[411,412],"class_list":["post-2356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-friends","category-travel","tag-vacation","tag-vermont"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karenrsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karenrsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karenrsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karenrsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karenrsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2356"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.karenrsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2409,"href":"https:\/\/www.karenrsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2356\/revisions\/2409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karenrsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karenrsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karenrsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}