Taking the long way

Day 278
Montpelier VT- Fisher's Landing NY

There's a reason behind the madness. Sure the route I picked from Maine to Niagara Falls is a little twisty, but we are still traveling after all. Yesterday's tiny capitol wasn't half bad and the night at Wal-Mart was a quiet one. Now on to the main event. There is ice cream in these hills.

Ben & Jerry's ice cream plant has tours to the public. Everybody loves ice cream. That was the thought process that Ben & Jerry had when they started up a small ice cream shop in the 70's. As things grew they built a production plant to go with it. In the small town of Waterbury Vermont locals can proudly call this place theirs.

The plant is fairly small but well laid out for a tourist attraction. Parking is adequate. The signage is minimal on the outside. It's got a nice courtyard for the occasional tour bus and field trips that visit the grounds. It's got an almost childish like sense of humor with colorful displays everywhere. 

Once inside the door things don't change much. It's a very small space. The crowd in the picture is our group of approximately 30 people that are here for the 1040 tour. Tours run every 20 minutes and tickets sell for $4 a piece. Off to my right is a little gift shop with the typical souvenir trinkety crap. Want a t-shirt that advertises for the company? That'll be $22 please. 

The tour takes us into a 7 minute long promotional video outlining how the founders of Ben & Jerry's were much more interested in changing the world than just selling ice cream. It outlines all the activist organizations it has been a part of along with the social responsibility of trying to run a planet happy production facility. Oddly.... there is one 15 second section that completely squishes all of this and nobody seemed to catch it. A small blurb in the presentation said "Ben & Jerry tried their hardest to keep this a privately ran company, but evenutally the time came to sell it to Unilever". Tried their hardest you say? You mean Unilever showed up with a truck load of cash in the year 2000. They sold the brand for $326 million dollars with the agreement that the "company" would retain it's own board of directors. Now it makes sense. This factory is just for show and tell. Unilver owns two other operational plants where the bulk of the ice cream is made and the public are not invited to visit. 

Who is Unilever you ask? They own brands such as: Popsicle, Klondike, Breyers, Lipton, Dove, and the list goes on and on. Here's to the American Dream. Make a business to change the world and sell out to a corporation in the Netherlands. Cheers.

We head outside after our free samples and avoid the ice cream bar at the exit. Single scoop cones are going for $5 a piece. Skipping the expensive ice cream (it's cheaper at the store), we head back to the RV and see a couple of more cool things outside. There is a massive solar array that was installed here in 2015. It generates enough power to almost cover the electrical operation needs of the single production line plant.

The last silly thing on campus is the flavor graveyard. Granite headstones are put up to say goodbye to flavors that never succeeded on the market. Seems like a valuable use of the earth's resources for a company so focused on saving the plant.

Now it's time to focus on the drive. We've got a long way to go. Penny turns north and we motor towards the Canadian border. A turn left on highway 2 takes us across the Grand Isles of Lake Champlain and into the state of New York. By 3 o'clock we pull into free parking spot #2 for the trip. It's a casino with a halfway level lot and plenty of space for us to put out at least one of our slides. What we were not counting on was the weather. It's 87 degrees outside which means it is over 90 on the inside. Penny is brown on the outside and loves to soak up the sun rays. Add to that the entire drive train is nice and hot. That heat percolates up through the floor and makes things even hotter. It will be a miserable night if we don't run the AC. What ever shall we do? We have a little more than two weeks from being finished with this trip of a lifetime. Should we make two of those days suck, or spend a couple more bucks and book a nice place to stay with full hookups?

The map gets checked and phone calls are made. It's hammer down as we head south another 100 miles to an RV resort on the St. Lawrence river. We finally arrive and it is already 5 pm. The good news is that we have covered lots of miles in the last two days. The credit card comes out and $73 gets us a place to call home for two nights. Now to crack open a cold beer and rest my weary eyes. We are almost done with our life on the road.