Being retired folks, for the most part, we can take off midweek and go where ever the heck we want, well mostly. As some of you may know I like to bake, especially bread, and I am a fan of King Arthur Flour, for no particular reason other than I am. So what better thing to do on a midweek adventure than take a ride to Vermont to the King Arthur Flour headquarters…and did I mention they have a store there. So we convinced our friends Van and Andi to come along, it didn’t take much convincing as Andi is a baker too and a much better baker than I. The ride up was fun and filled with great conversation and lots of laughter. We stopped for lunch in White River Junction at a cool little restaurant called Tuckerbox, which came highly recommended, and lived up to its’ recommendation. I won’t bore you with baking stories or even the shopping spree at King Arthur Flour other than to say we had a great time and we all came home with bags full of goodies. After visiting the King we found our hotel in White River Junction and foraged for supper. We had wicked awesome ribs for supper at a nearby restaurant called Wicked Awesome Ribs. It too lived up to its’ name.
The following morning after we had breakfast at the hotel we drove the short drive up to the town of Quechee in search of the Quechee Gorge and a morning hike before the drive home. I had found this spot on the web and it look good. It was no so much a hike but a nice walk with some good downhill and uphill terrain to keep it interesting. The gorge itself is a deep cut in the rocks created by the Quattaquechee River, the hike in total was under three miles so we weren’t too exhausted when we returned to the car.
The gorge was actually tough to view from the trail as we were ‘protected’ by a chain link fence. We guessed that the fence was there to keep the selfie crown from backing into the gorge… The best views of the gorge were from the bridge, and interestingly enough someone had the forethought to make holes in the fencing on the bridge to stick you camera through to get the iconic gorge shots. Pretty cool. We had a great hike/stroll through the Vermont woods with the sound of the river providing the soundtrack for the morning.
By the time we returned to the car it was nearing noon. We ventured into the town of Quechee which was just as cute and quaint as you would expect in Vermont, we even crossed over a covered bridge. We visited the Simon Pierce Glass factory store..lots of expensive stuff here and thankfully I didn’t break anything. . . Simon’s brother Andrew is a wood turner and I liked his bowls better. . but that’s just me.
The next stop was the Quechee Antiques Mall a veritable amusement park for shopping and of course I found nothing I needed but we had fun walking around looking at stuff. . . and I sampled a lot of cheese. Back on the road we decided to drive for an hour before stopping for lunch as we all had a good breakfast back at the hotel. The hour stretched to an hour and a half and then to two hours as we could not find anyplace to stop. It actually got to be funny as Andi was searching on her phone for someplace other than a pizza place, and each and every time we found a place it was either closed (we missed one place by 10 minutes) or out of business. Finally we found a roadside restaurant somewhere in Massachusetts (we had left Vermont and driven through New Hampshire) and had a fantastic lunch — you see, it almost always works out. We made it home just after dark and even got to enjoy some of Providence’s rush hour traffic…love these midweek adventures. Below is a gallery of the the hike and the Vermont scenery.
