Though our Road Trip really started in Chautauqua, the numbering should start here.
Day 1: Bennington, Vermont
After leaving Chautauqua we headed for the New York Turnpike headed East. One thing to note: since we are from Missouri where nothing is a toll road, we decided to get a transponder to use for the toll roads in the east. I discovered that Illinois has a system you can use called I-pass which also works with EZ pass so I signed up for that and loaded money and they sent me a sticker for the car. I decided to use the Illinois system since we live near Illinois and I thought it might come in handy in the future for possible driving in Illinois as well, but if you are headed east, you should definitely look into something, because there are a lot of toll roads and there are no booths.
But truthfully, we don’t know if our pass worked in New York, and to this day, we still don’t know. More on that later, but anyway. We drove for a few hours to our first stop, the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, New York, which is a newer park.
The google directions were a little confusing, so I would recommend actually not using them and probably using directions from the actual site or the NPS app, but that’s what we used, so first we actually ended up at the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, which is part of the park, but just a closed building.
And another home which Tubman lived in at a later point in her life.
But then we found a better address and found the Visitor’s Center, where there was a friendly cat who lived nearby, so Louie immediately made a new friend.
The park consists of a few places: the home we saw first, which is being restored, and then the visitor’s center and the church next door, which is the church where Tubman went and then was where her funeral was held. It was interesting because the church was just in a residential neighborhood so you parked on a street–it made me wonder how the neighbors felt about all of this! But it probably made their property values better, so hopefully they like that. Or maybe they dislike the traffic.
It was also interesting to see how the parks come into being, meaning, how the parks service takes a place and restores it. The church was in the process of being restored to how it looked before, because it was a little rundown and they want it to look as it was when Tubman went there. And the house she lived in–we peeked inside and could see that it was being restored, and somebody had been redoing the walls, but with NEW plaster and lathe, which, if you know anything about construction, is not how modern construction is done, but IS how old construction is done. So that was quite fascinating.
The rangers onsite were friendly and full of information, as you would expect, even as they were telling us much of the restoration was stalled due to lack of funding–just as the park was founded as a park, they lost funding due to the current administration.
Then we went to the nearby cemetery to see Tubman’s final resting stop.
I have to confess, before this trip I hadn’t been into cemeteries and seeing where people were buried, but somehow this trip I started thinking about how it was kind of fascinating to think about: right here, right under here is where this person might actually BE. Though truthfully they probably aren’t really there and have probably shifted further away over the years, but there is still something to think about it that in the past I hadn’t thought about that much. That their physical bones are there, that they really existed. I don’t know why, but that never interested me before and then it suddenly did.
We were hungry after this so we found a Thai restaurant nearby with a high rating, called Spoon and Fork, so we had a quick lunch there and then kept driving.
We had about 3 1/2 more hours to drive, but once we got off the interstate highway, the drive became more interesting and more scenic. We didn’t enter Vermont until very close to Bennington, though! Once you get to Vermont, there aren’t any billboards, did you know? That’s a state law, evidently.
Our goal for the first night was Bennington, Vermont, and we got there around dinner time. It looked like a really cute New England town, exactly what you might daydream about if you had seen a commercial for a generic New England town. We checked into the Catamount Motel, which was the cheapest highly rated motel I could find, and it was perfect.
We decided to set off on foot for the rest of the evening, so we walked to the downtown area for dinner, and enjoyed food at the Madison Brewing Company.
A Catamount!
A Moose!
We shared a tasting at the Madison Brewing Company and had some good food as well. After dinner we took a walk around the town, which was older than we were used to things being in the US.
And then we had another drink at the Harvest Brewery company before bed.
Day 2: Driving Route 100 to White River Junction, Vermont
We had coffee and muffins in downtown Bennington and did a quick drive by of the Bennington Monument and Robert Frost’s Grave before heading out of town.
We had a little trouble finding Frost’s grave because we entered the cemetery from the wrong entrance. One entrance had terrific signage and it would have been easy but we used the wrong sign. It was a beautiful cemetery either way, and a beautiful morning. The grass was wet and dewy, and the air was cool and crisp. It felt like fall and it was only August 2.
We got in the car and headed towards Wilmington Vermont, where we planned to find Route 100 and drive north on it. It was a scenic route and we planned to drive it and stop where the wind took us. We also had an app called “guide along” we would listen to that might make suggestions. We stopped in Wilmington for a coffee and stroll as well, and ended up buying a beautiful wooden cheese board (small cutting board, basically).
It was probably mid morning by the time we actually got onto Route 100, but whatever. We figured we only had a few actual hours of driving (maybe 3? it was hard to actually figure it out because the route we were planning was not the best/most direct route, but instead the most scenic, so the map would always try to reroute us).
We saw a farmer’s market and stopped, got a loaf of bread and petted some goats.
And we saw our first covered bridge!
This was the longest one in Vermont: you could not drive through it but you could walk across it.
After the bridge we went on a bike ride in Jamaica State Park–we’d brought the bikes so we wanted to make sure to use them!
Back in the car after that and on the road–we came to a screeching halt and turned into a shop called “Grandma Miller’s pie shop.” I said, well I had a Grandma Miller but she didn’t really make pies!
I can never turn down something with rhubarb or strawberry rhubarb though, yum!
Our next big stop was the Vermont Country Store. You guys. You know the place that sends the catalogs, right? And we thought, oh this will be a big tourist trap, and while, yes, it was, it was ALSO a really nice store, well curated, well set up, nicely organized, with good space, and it was a lovely shopping experience. We had a nice time, bought maple syrup, etc. Definitely worth a stop, and then afterwards we had maple cremees which are basically Vermont’s soft service ice cream in a maple flavor, a must try when you are in Vermont.
(You actually go in the back though)
I forget where we took this picture, but it was fun.
Another big stop we made was at the Calvin Coolidge State Historical Site. We visited near closing time so we decided to skip the indoor exhibits and just visit the outdoor exhibits and the cheese factory (FREE CHEESE SAMPLES, and we also bought cheese), and really enjoyed that. It was basically an open air museum, which Louie and I have discovered is one of our favorite kinds of museums.
We got to see where Calvin Coolidge was born, where he lived growing up (basically the same place) and where he was when he was Vice President and then President William Harding died in office, and Coolidge had to take the oath of office and become President of the US–all basically within a few houses of each other. And then we drove a short distance to see where he was buried.
A fairly unassuming grave.
After that, we headed to our hotel for the night, that was a bit of a diversion from Route 100. I found that to get a nice hotel for a decent price we needed to divert, so we headed east to White River Junction to stay at Hotel Coolidge (perhaps fitting?) which was a historic hotel there. We checked into our room and then ate at a nearby restaurant called Tuckerbox which served Turkish food.
We enjoyed the food but had a little snafu with the prices: this was a bit ridiculous: the menus we ordered from had different prices on them that what we were charged (and what were on the website) and then the server said, well, our prices went up and not all the menus reflected the changes, and showed us that some of the menus had the newer prices. Which was like, ummm, okayyyyyy. But it was nearly impossible to prove that OUR menus had had lower prices and honestly, what, you should also believe us, and so we had to pay higher prices that what we thought when we ordered (and again, also higher than what they publish on their website) so we can’t in good conscience recommend the restaurant, because that is really shady. In my opinion. And really put a damper on what was otherwise a perfectly lovely day and evening.
After dinner we took a walk and the weather was lovely, and the town was pretty cute, there were a lot of train tracks and a river and we were really near New Hampshire as well. The Hotel was “historic” which meant that the hallways were big and the hotel was big with a giant bathroom that seem like how did it get added in and you weren’t sure what was going on, but it was nice, and I would recommend it. There was a dedicated parking lot behind the building, sort of inside the block as well, and a Keurig coffee maker in the lobby with free coffee for hotel customers.
That’s where I will end this blog post. Next time, we will continue up Route 100 to Stowe, Vermont, for more cheese and some apple cider, and maybe bears, but maybe not bears.
