Conventional wisdom holds that sliced bread, flush toilets, and electricity are among man's greatest inventions and, yes, I do throughly enjoy all of those things, but I would like to submit that cheese should be at the top of the Great Inventions List. That's right, cheeeeese! Today, in celebration of cheese, Mike and I went up to Vermont, where some clever Vermonters have concocted a genius tourist-trap/marketing plan. They created the Vermont Cheese Trail, which is much like the wine trails of Napa and Sonoma, but dedicated to all things cheese.
Mike and I plotted out our visit to the Cheese Trail Farms, based on what cheeses they offered, how reasonably close to each other they were, and whether or not they would be open. Then we grabbed our GPS system (Emily) and set off. It turns out that rural Vermont is a little beyond Emily's scope, for she sent us down several (yes, several) dirt roads, the first of which turned out to be someone's driveway. Ooops!
After a few harrowing trips up (and back down) the dirt roads, we made it to the Vermont Shepherd, our first stop. We sent our car creeping down the dirt (again) driveway and pulled up in front of this little yellow house advertising cheese for sale and telling us to serve ourselves. Mike and I are such cityslickers that we sat in the car for a minute, trying to puzzle out what, exactly, that meant. Mike kept saying that the couldn't mean, just go in a take what you want, leaving the correct amount of money, no one would be that trusting. And I kept pointing to the purple sign right next to the car that said "Help Yourself." We decided maybe they did mean it and got out of the car, thinking that if the door was unlocked, they did in fact mean what they'd said. The door was unlocked! So we went in and helped ourselves. The only drawbacks to the help-yourself-system were: (a) no means of tasting the cheese before purchasing; (2) no means of making change when all you have is $20's; and (d) having to calculate the tax yourself. But we did manage to procure three skeins of yarn (project as yet undetermined, but I'm thinking, sweater) from the sheep grazing outside (the first photo) and some cheese that turned out to be really good, once we got home and tasted it.
On our way to the next farm (which turned out to be our second and last) we stopped in Putney, VT, mainly because on the way into town was a sign that read "Best Small Town in the Country," and heck, a claim like that needs to be verified (or at least investigated). We didn't get a chance to explore the entire town (and so can't confirm the claim), but we did go into two shops that had Things We Couldn't Live Without (including a Mother's Day gift for my Bob). And there was one random shop that had those clay faces on its exterior. There was no explanation for the clay faces, but I thought that they were fabulous and any town that sported such clay faces definitely had to at least in the running for Best Small Town.
The second (and last) farm we visited turned out to be more of a Cheese Emporium than a small farm stand and it had a petting zoo that boasted several goats, a small herd of donkeys and this white pony. Or as my 20-month old niece would say "ponyponypony"!
Inside the Cheese Emporium (otherwise known as Grafton Village Cheese) they were offering a multitude of cheeses to taste AND they had a small staff there to assist you. (Novel approach.) So Mike and I willingly indulged the nice people at Grafton Village and tasted ALL of their cheeses. To make up for our pigginess, we also bought two different kinds of cheese, some fabulous mustard (never thought you'd see those two words in a row, eh?), some fresh bread, and wine. The plan was to make the wine, bread, and cheeses into our late lunch, but then we couldn't find a place to sit, so we thought we'd save the wine and just have the cheese and bread in the car. Cheese and bread are two things not easily eaten while driving. To make up for this we stopped in another small Vermont town and had lunch and some of their wine. By the time we were done with that, it was getting late and we were sure that the dogs would be standing in front of the door with their legs crossed. We decided to call it a day and leave the rest of the cheese to be tasted another time.
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