DAY 21 THURSDAY 27th SEPTEMBER 2007

Waterbury, VT and Elizabethtown, NY (Miles to Date:1795)

We woke just about the time Karen’s mother’s funeral was taking place in the UK, so the day started with a period of contemplation. The plans for the rest of the day were quite simple – visit the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Waterbury, VT and then continue onwards to Elizabeth Town in upstate New York.

Getting to Ben & Jerry’s was a bit of a doubling back on the previous days journey but was deemed to be an essential part of the children’s home schooling curriculum for this year. Also reflected their father’s addiction to ice cream!! We decided to do the tour of the factory – primarily because you get ice cream samples at the end (and for the educational element of seeing a factory in production. )They are really geared up for the tour and judging by the size of the car park it is quite big business for them. The tour is in three parts. Unfortunately the guy doing our tour was a novice and had neither well honed presentation skills or knew much about the factory and the B&J business. Part 1 of the tour is a film about Ben and Jerry (yes they were real people) and how they developed a quirky business around quirky named ice creams. They started out by paying $5 for correspondence course in ice cream making from Penn State University (apparently they chose ice cream because the equipment was cheaper than bagel making equipment). The 2nd part of the tour is the viewing of the production areas – we were told no photography was allowed, although I expect if I were a determined industrial espionage expert it would not have been too difficult to break their security. I did feel sorry for the poor people working on the shop floor, pacing the halls of their work like caged lions. Seemingly the equipment felt equally resentful of its imprisonment and started to spill pots of ice cream the wrong way up on the production line conveyor belt. The workers stormed around the problem area like worker bees defending their hives and soon all was well. The final part of the tour took us to the tasting room where they had some rather sweet and sickly strawberry flavour on tasting for that day (most disappointing). To take the memory away of this pink, sugary monstrosity we had to visit the store and buy some other ice cream to wash away the memories.

After gorging on ice cream we had to take our leave and continue our journey to upstate New York. We were planning to stay in Elizabethtown for the night as we had some business there the next day. Our room for the night was a last minute arrangement at the quaintly named Cobble Hill Inn – but quaint it wasn’t. I was glad Karen was not with us otherwise we’d have been looking else where. The Cobble Hill Inn is a collection of 7 rooms attached to a somewhat seedy Irish bar. The beds were ridiculously uncomfortable – sagging mattresses and one of the light fittings was missing from the wall, and the wires were hanging out of the wall with no insulation tape around the bare wire ends. In the bathroom ,stuck to the mirror above the sink ,was a hand written note explaining the hot water leaked and was turned off at a tap underneath the sink. Oh well- we were only there for one night.