Vermont (or part of it)

Husband and I have not gone away overnight since our honeymoon.  We haven't taken RR on any sort of vacation in a few years.  And before you feel bad for him he goes away to camp and goes on vacation with my mom and his cousins; he is certainly not vacation deprived.  That being said Husband and I were itching to get a way for a little while so we planned a mini-vacation in Stowe, VT.

We headed up on a Friday.  A very wet and rainy Friday, which turned into a snowy and freezing rain Friday.  The drive was terrible.  What should have taken a little over 3 hours took more than 5.

OK, the weather sucked for the whole trip.  Let's just put that out there now.  I don't think we saw more than 5 seconds of sun the whole weekend.

RR is getting "too cool" for pictures.

These are the boys hanging out in our first hotel room.  It was wicked small, after the first night; which was borderline hellish; we stopped being so cheap and sprang for the much larger room for $10  a night.  (Seriously if I knew it was only $10 more we would have moved sooner.)

Now the whole trip was centered around taking RR to Ben and Jerry's (and being able to take the boys swimming).  RR loves those TV shows that feature food eating contests; and consequently loves being in food eating contests himself, even if they are made up and in our kitchen (like the time he changed his 17 year old aunt and 19 year old babysitter to a pancake eat-off).  In on the shows he watches he saw someone trying to eat the Ben and Jerry's Vermonster; and wanted to try it himself.

Now if you have never heard of the Vermonster it has 20 scoop of ice cream, cookies, brownies, bananas, caramel and hot fudge sauces, plus many more options.... but NO cherry.  (What is up with that?)  It also has upwards of 10,000 calories (and costs around $50). This is a serious sundae people, and my family are serious ice cream lovers.... me, I could eat it everyday (and so could my boys), but this sundae was just out of our league.  So after the factory tour I convinced RR to go with the mini-Vermonster sundae.  There is nothing mini about this people.

We tried.  We almost made it.

Yes, that is snow on the ground in mid April, and no we are not in the Dakotas.  

Any ice cream product that is served in it's own bucket is serious business.  RR started out strong, but had a weak finish and was the first to call it quits (so not like him).  TT hung in by himself for a while (man, can that kid eat) and even Husband got in on the action (after he swore he wasn't going to, but I made sure I got his Chunky Monkey ice cream in it... so he was putty in my hands).  But despite our best efforts we just could not finish it, we came close though.  Sadly, because of the weather

Now before you start thinking we drove 5 hours to eat ice cream, I will have you know there was more to this trip.  There was an trip to the cider mill, and Cabot cheese and yummy chocolates.  (Can you say, total food fest.)

Aside from all the food we spent time hanging out at the pool and hanging out with each other in the hotel room and just plain relaxing.

It was good to get away and the trip home was much less adventurous than the trip up there... and we even left early... because we woke up and it was snowing, again.  We stopped at the Vermont Country store and looked at silly hats, old fashioned toys and left with giant pickles, penny candy and a bar of Fels-Naptha soap (to get out all of the ice cream stains.)  But it was good to be home again as well.

   In case you are wondering, this is how much milk and sugar Husband needs for his coffee.  Two small silos are cream, 2 are milk and the big one is sugar.