the north, part 2

After staying at the B&B in Southern Vermont we took a swing up through Burlington. One of the differences between Vermont and home is that there are little road signs everywhere listing nearby attractions and other businesses everywhere. Well, as we were driving into Burlington we noticed a sign for Magic Hat Brewery and decided to just run in and see what could be had.

There was, in fact, a magic hat outside. They weren't offering tours that day but they had a neat balcony overviewing their bottling operation. The only thing we didn't see at Ommegang was their bottling operation running and it was awesome, loud and just all around fun to watch the high volume bottling going. We're suckers for a good factory.

. . . Like the Ben and Jerry's factory that we also went to just on the other side of Burlington. Their tour was pretty neat but it was a lot fancier than the low budget brewery tours that we'd seen before. It did come with a tasty sample at the end though. Curt might have neglected to take the camera on the tour with him so there aren't any good photos; although, we do have this photo of the big tanks out back.

So we'd been through the White Mountains in Vermont, through Burlington in the northwest of Vermont so we then headed over to New Hampshire and the Green Mountains where we camped for the night. We found a nice campsite in the woods. There was a campground host trailer there but we never actually saw any other people in the whole campground. We particularly liked the loud creek running near the tent.

The drive through the Green Mountains was particularly beautiful.

As you can see we were a bit ahead of peak leaf season. Honestly though, the trip was scheduled around the half-marathon so the fact that we saw much of fall at all was great.

We were planning to camp in Baxter State Park toward the upper part of Maine that night. As you can see though things were quite cloudy and the rain was coming. By the time we were getting into Maine it was clear that if we went camping it would be camping in the cold, pounding rain. Both set up and tear down. That, combined with the fact it was kind of out of the way and that Susan was getting sick meant we decided to find somewhere to stay for the night. Eliminating Baxter put us a day ahead of schedule and we went ahead and aimed for the Maine coast/Canadian border.

The beginnings of our trip down the Maine coast will be coming soon.