Gorgeous Vermont mountains...

Alan had a business trip planned for Manchester, Vermont March 24. He asked me if I wanted to come up there with him for a weekend getaway. Of course I wanted to, even though it involved a plane ride.. Alan got a phone call that our 8am flight to Washington got cancelled. He then called to reschedule and we got an 11am flight to New York City. I held the plane up the entire time. It was horrible. The takeoff is what I hate the most. The super fast speeds, the slant of the plane, the cloud turbulence, the plane trying to get even, the turning on a dime(I mean you have the whole sky, Mr Pilot)... oh boy. After a layover in NY, they called our plane to board. We walk outside and it's a prop plane. *sigh* I look at Alan and say "Are you serious? Is this our plane?" He, being the husband that will try to make all bad things in my life sound not nearly as bad said "Yeah, it ours, they ride a bit different than regular planes but it will be okay, they are just really loud" So of course I proceed to freak out because I know when Alan says something is "different" than it should be, it's going to be bad. It really wasn't that bad. Other than the loud propellers, I actually liked that ride better than the normal plane. It didn't seem as bumpy to me. Then we get to Vermont, look out the window as we are landing and see these gorgeous mountains and all is well:This is the scenery all over Vermont. The mountains are huge. There was snow on the ground and it was in the low 30s Thursday. We get our rental car, type in the hotel address and go on our way. What was supposed to be an hour and half drive took 2 hours since our lovely GPS took us 30 minutes out of the way. I hate trusting those stupid things. We did make it to our hotel around 9:30, went to get something to eat and headed to bed. It was a long day in the airports!

Friday morning was Alan's meeting so he got up, broke an out of town rule by going to McDonalds(I have a rule that we can't eat at chain restaurants when we are out of town) and got breakfast. I'm glad he broke the rule cause the food in Vermont is not as good as our food from home so that bagel was the 2nd best meal I had the whole trip! Then I took him to where he was going so I could have the car to wander around. I dropped him off and headed into town to find out the shops didn't open until 10(it was 8am). So I head back to the room to watch some tv when Alan called. We had planned to stay in Manchester Thursday night, check out and head to Burlington and stay Friday and Saturday night. Alan said the guy at the plant he was touring said that Manchester was the place to be for scenery and to get the 'true Vermont feel'. So I go to the office, see if we can stay 2 more nights and she says yes but we have to change rooms. I agree and check out of one and into another. They had a huge group of military men coming in and I guess they had reserved a block of rooms. Here is the front of the hotel. Pretty nice view!

Around 10, I head to the Carters(baby clothes) outlet and snag some, hopefully neutral, clothes. I was able to get everything below, except the jeans and the red onesie beside the blue one for $19 total! Everything was on clearance and I think it's pretty neutral. The little blue outfit is a little boyish but our little girl could wear it too. Who says girls have to wear frills? :) After that, I went to Gap and got the jeans and the red onesie for $7! The jeans are way too cute! And for $5, marked down from $25, they are even cuter!

While standing in the checkout line at Gap, Alan called saying he was ready to be picked up. I pick him up, head back to the room for him to change and we decide to take a roadtrip to see some scenery. We are on the road for about 3-4 hours. Here's one of the stops we made. It was at a ski slope. We didn't ski but stopped by to take some pics.

We're not in Kansas anymore...

Snowmobile crossing... We don't see these around South Carolina!

The roads were dry. All that snow on the ground and we never once passed a snow plow or salt/sand truck. They know what they are doing up north!We saw lots of small ponds that were frozen and on a few of them were ice fishers.
This makes me nervous!
We saw lots and lots of stunning mountains
On Saturday, we decided to leave and head to Burlington and see what it had to offer. We booked a room and checked out of our current room. We saw just the right amount of snow without being annoying or way too cold and nastyand lots of cars that looks like this...We got to Waterbury, Vermont and Alan noticed the original Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream factory was there. We decided to stop and do the tour. The plant wasn't working so the tour was a little boring but I learned some things I had no idea about. Like that they use non-hormone induced cows and no artificial colors, which is pretty great. We made it into Burlington, checked into our room and headed out to check out the town. We find Lake Camplain and luckily it's sunset! Isn't this gorgeous?This is how cold it was. This is the shore of the lake. All ice. Crazy!
We did lots of looking around at some stores, went out to eat at a seafood restaurant that night and then went to a local coffee shop afterward. We then went back to the room. We checked out about 11:30 Sunday morning, went back to the Lake where Alan took a few more pics and we headed to the airport for our 3:00 flight to Pennsylvania. We made it safely to Pa where we were looking forward to a 4 hour layover. Around 8:30, the plane should have been boarding but it was not. Around 9, the announcer guy said they called maintenance on our plane and it would be delayed until 10. Great. The waiting part for me wasn't the worst part. I didn't want to be on a plane that just had maintenance called on it. I'm just sure it was the engine they were working on! After waiting for a while, around 10:30 they said they called another plane in and we would be leaving soon. We finally head out about 10:45. Luckily we are able to sleep on the plane since it didn't land until 12:20 or so. We got our luggage and headed home. By the time we got in bed it was 1:30. Since both of us worked Monday, it was pretty rough getting up. I caught up the whole rest of the week and should be in bed now but this blog has taken way longer to type up than I thought it would. But now I'm heading that way! Alan is going back to Vermont in a few months I think and I will be sad that I won't be able to go since I either be too far along or will have a tiny newborn! I would love to go back in the Fall, at some point.