Aug 27, 2024 – Quechee, VT
We moved to Quechee, VT, today but there was no hurry to leave since it was just a two hour drive and we were welcome to stay at Amy & Lindsay’s as long as we wanted. Bill posted five episodes to this blog, which is a record number of episodes at once.
Before leaving Wolfeboro, we toured Amy & Lindsay’s Class A motorhome. It’s a really nice unit, not overly long but with enough slide outs to make it really feel spacious. They say they want to downsize, eventually, though. With only one dog now, they really don’t need the floor space and it would certainly save on fuel. We really enjoyed our time with these two folks and would love to cross paths with them again. But, we finally said our goodbyes and hit the road.
The drive to Quechee State Park was an easy one. The park is a fairly small one but the wooded sites in the campground area are very spacious. None of the sites have electricity, so that limits the variety of folks who stay here. Quechee SP also includes the rather famous gorge by the same name and we will walk the gorge tomorrow. Quechee is also the name of a lovely small town and we drove through it and around the area to get a feel for it.
Dinner was cheeseburgers, corn-on-the-cob and a tomato salad made with heirloom cherry tomatoes grown by Amy & Lindsay and an avocado.
Aug 28, 2024 – Quechee, VT
Stopping at the park’s visitor center, we got a trail map and set out to walk the gorge. The trail had been recently refurbished and was one of the most pristine trails we’ve ever walked. The trail began in the center of the gorge and followed its rim to the bottom.
Back at the top, however, is a detour. The normal trail runs under the Rt-4 bridge across the gorge. Because the bridge is undergoing some reconstruction, the portion of the trail under the bridge had to be temporarily closed. Unfortunately, that portion also had the best view of the gorge from the trail. The bridge’s pedestrian walkway was still open, however, and we could take in the upstream view of the gorge from the walkway.
Continuing on the other side of the bridge, we followed the gorge to the top. There is a beautiful natural waterfall there. A dam just above the falls is equipped with a small hydroelectric generation facility.
Back in our car, we drove across the two-lane Quechee Covered Bridge to the Simon Pearce Glass Blowing Facility & Restaurant. It’s a somewhat oddly repurposed old mill building. On the one hand it is a large, elegant, white table cloth restaurant with event facilities upstairs. But the lobby is also the front end of a large glassware retail space. In the middle of the retail space is a large stairway leading visitors down to the glassmaking furnaces where their elegant glassware is hand blown.
Of note is a series of pictures from a 2011 flood that devastated the factory. The building is only 100 yards or so upstream from the Quechee Covered Bridge and one photo shows just how high the water was under the bridge.
Next stop was the Sugarbush Farm where maple syrup and cheeses are produced. The drive was several miles, nearly all uphill on narrow, eventually gravel roads. Humorous signs encouraged visitors to keep driving, assuring them they were on the right road.
First stop was a building where three women were packaging smoked cheeses that had come out of the smoker the evening before. Each block was wrapped in foil and then hand dipped in two layers of wax, one clear and the other color coded to indicate the type of cheese. The cheeses are then aged in a building next door that houses up to 35,000 pounds of cheese, some for up to eight years.
Sugarbush Farm started out, though, producing maple syrup. Today they tap about 10,000 trees and use modern vacuum systems to pull the syrup into remote tanks. The sap is then moved to the farm and pumped into outdoor storage tanks that hold about 120,000 gallons. From those tanks it is transferred inside to the boiling room. Sugarbush still uses a flat plate evaporator system, albeit a shiny, stainless steel one, to reduce each forty gallons of sap down to one gallon of syrup. Their evaporation process is still wood fired and that takes a lot of firewood!
It’s been a few years since we last passed through Woodstock so, afterwards, we drove there to reconnoiter the area. It’s still just as pretty as we remembered. If we have time we’ll return to spend some time there. On our drive back to Quechee we stopped to take a picture of the Taftsville Covered Bridge, beautifully reflected in a placid area of the river.
We had dinner that evening at the Public House, just across the highway from the campground entrance. It’s a good place and we recommend it.