Day 5 - Brattleboro to Burlington

I managed to sleep til 630 this morning which was a bit of boon. We still headed out quite early and headed north to Windsor for breakfast. The Windsor Diner is an adorable old-school diner from 1952,  K just had eggs, toast and homefries and I had blueberry pancakes with maple syrup. Delicious!

Back on the road and we headed towards Woodstock (not that one). We saw the Taftsville covered bridge then decided to take a wee detour to Sugarbush Farm. It was worth the drive as they make cheese and maple syrup - on top of that the views were amazing! We did a cheese and a maple syrup tasting and then bought quite a lot of the latter. It is probably luck that we can't keep the cheese refrigerated for the 10 days or we'd probably have bought that too.

The drive West along route 4 was lovely but sadly we were blighted by rain again so our planned gondola ride up Mt Killington was cancelled :( *shakes fist at the sky*

We popped into Maple Sugar & Vermont Spice for a coffee and a snack but somehow ended up having lunch. The soups of the day were cream of mushroom and beef stew. I got a cup of beef stew soup with a cheese toastie and K got a bowl of the cream of mushroom.  What we learned is that a "cup" of soup is a bowl and a "bowl" of soup is a terrine! I assumed that the beef stew soup would be a soup/stew hybrid but it was thicker than most stews I've had. It was fully delicious but I couldn't finish it and only ate half of the toastie. I think K is still working on her's.

Cruising along the leaves were really beautiful, lots of reds, but i didn't manage to get any good photos cos of the shite weather.  We enjoyed it with our eyes though. The route was littered with dozens of farm stands and maple syrup stands. We didn't stop at any til Dakin Farm where we had millions of samples, probably more than was couth.

Our next stop was Village Coffee and Wine in Shelburne. We had the coffee not the wine. Shelburne was a lovely wee town but we didn't have much time cos we covered a lot of ground today.

K requested the next stop - the world's tallest filing cabinet! The kind of nonsense that we both love. In reality it was loads of filing cabinets piled on top of each other but I'm still glad we saw it.

We stopped quickly at Blanchard Beach in the south of Burlington to look over to New York state before heading on to the motel in the North of the city. Our motel (The Starlight Inn) is attached to a drive-in movie theatre and is movie themed. Every room is named after a movie star and we have the "Newman and Redford" - amazing! Next door on one side is the "Tom Cruise" and on the other is "Elvis". Included in the room rate is access to the drive-in and you can also listen to the films on the in-room radio. Unfortunately, tonight's movie was a Roger Waters concert film - I listened to a bit of it for the novelty.

We headed into Burlington city centre for a poke about and dinner and I fell in love. It is a lovely wee city with a great vibe. Plus they seem to love the gays. After a wee wander about, we went for dinner at a lovely wee mexican called El Cortijo. It was a converted old diner car and was adorable. K loved it because the tortilla chips appeared to be bottomless, we finished them and more appeared like magic! I had tortilla soup and 2 tacos and K had 3 tacos. The tacos were great but the soup was excellent. I had a marg and K had a homemade limeade.

After dinner we popped to the bookshop nexr door for a wee poot about before heading back to the motel to watch trashy tv including "The Great Canadian Baking Show" which is an exact replica of bake off.

Tomorrow: more Vermont including the Ben and Jerry's factory!