Our first stop on our two week Canadian Road Trip wasn’t in Canada at all. Quebec City is about 10 hours from our house, so we decided to stop for the night in Burlington, Vermont. This was strategic as I had never been to Vermont and I wanted to visit the Ben and Jerry’s factory in Waterbury, VT.
Vermont is a beautiful place and I wish we had more time there. We’ll definitely have to go back, especially now that we have a son going to college in Massachusetts.
We stayed in Burlington/Williston for the night. It’s halfway between Waterbury and Burlington and the Fairfield Marriot hotel was clean and cheap and offered free breakfast.
We got to Waterbury about 2:30 in the afternoon and went to Ben and Jerry’s first. Why not have ice cream for lunch? The factory tour took about 15 minutes, they let us try a new flavor (Caramel Blondie) and then we went to the scoop shop and got ice cream.
This was not their busy season but when it is they will easily sell out their tours for the day, so make sure you get there early. The longest line was for the scoop shop. The ground are huge and they have lots of picnic tables, a big playground for the kids and the Flavor Graveyard.
After ice cream, we were hungry for actual lunch so we went into downton Waterbury to find something to eat. It has a cute little downtown area that is easily walkable with shops, bars and restaurants. There’s free public parking behind the shops.
We ate a place called The Reservoir that serves small plates for lunch. It was perfect since we had just had ice cream. I had hot chicken steam buns which was basically a spicy Chick-fil-a sandwich. Dillon had some super hot wings, Casey had mac and cheese and Scott got some poutine. Warning- poutine outside of Canada is not real poutine. This was basically cheese fries with gravy. It was a great meal though and a nice place.
After lunch we headed to our hotel to check in and then out to Burlington to look around. Scott had looked on Atlas Obscura for some weird road side attractions and in Burlington, they have the world’s tallest filing cabinet and the Lake Champlain Monster statue.
After exploring Burlington for a bit, we drove back towards our hotel and stopped for dinner at the Vermont Tap House.
We missed the free breakfast at our hotel in the morning because we didn’t remember that it was Monday and not the weekend, so we found a local coffee shop that made the most amazing breakfast sandwiches. Scott and I got sausage, egg and cheese on a kaiser roll and the sausage patty was obviously homemade locally. It was so delicious. I’d recommend trying Williston Coffee if you are ever in the area.