Wed July 20,Thurs July 21

Wednesday was a travel day, we were heading towards Stowe VT. Almost everyone who has ever been to Vermont has been to Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, and we are no exception. As our truck began the trip up VT100 from the I-89 exit, the wheel developed a tendency to want to pull to the left. The weather was hot, (for VT, but not as hot as some of you are seeing in other parts of the country) so I gave in, if not for the tour again, but at least for an ice cream cone.

The plant has grown a little from our first visit, years ago, but most has not changed. This includes Ben & Jerry's personal commitment to their social mission. While we find ourselves out of snych with most of this philosophy, and believe me, Vermont is jammed packed with folks who do subscribe to it, I find it interesting to observe. While the guys still have the social mission first in their statements, their other two are given equal weight. I don't know if this is because of their ownership by Unilever today or not. Regardless the chocolate chip cookie dough, and coconut 7 layer bar were a cold snack on a hot day.
We continued on to our campground, and later in the day we went up to Stowe and The Trappe family lodge, another place we had not been to for about 30 years. It has grown dramatically over the years, but is still beautiful and has superb views. They not only have this lodge, but cabins and remote villas. It probably could be called the Trappe family campus or complex! Amazing when you consider it was started by refugees from the Nazis, and has grown mostly by family members.

The draw for us to Stowe was not the things that draw most people. Liz has an interest in Geology, and I love manufacturing. So we wanted to go to the granite quarry in Granitville. Thurs. morning saw us there where we would see white granite quarried, and fabricated into monuments and industrial items such as surface plates, and rolls for the printing process. We started with a tour of the quarry. It was immense. This photo shows three quarries, the oldest in the back, up to the current one they are working now. The water in the second one is 400 ft deep. Each step in the quarry is 100 ft.

Here is a shot with my longest telephoto. You can get some scale from the men. There are a couple of technologies used to extract the granite. The oldest here is drilling cores, around 3-4in and 6-8 in apart. They then use primacord explosive to separate the stone. They also use diamond bits on long chain about 1/4in dia to cut the blocks. The blocks are then raised using the cranes you see, and set down in the back for trucks to pick up. This granite is very fine grain, meaning that when it bubbled up as lava, it cooled very fast. Like the marble we saw on the other side of the state, granite comes in shades and different colors.
This granite comes in two shades, grey and white. When we went to the monument shop, we saw many different kinds of granite being fabricated in to monuments, tombstones, industrial products and more. The shop was immense, and I'll only show one shot here. They use automated sandblasters, masking, & coloring techniques. They fabricate products using granite from company quarries all over the world. Granite is very dense, weighing 170 lbs. per cu ft. So while this tombstone is heavy, some of the industrial products they make surpass this. They fabricate rolls 4 ft dia. and 20 ft long for paper processing out of granite because it will not flex - at all! They also make surface plates from a few sq ft to some we saw that were 25-30 ft long and several ft wide, as well as thick. These are ground flat to within tiny fractions of a human hair over the entire surface. Incredible. They had a couple of fun things too. This is a tile I'm sandblasting in a booth. The picture is a moose. The company is always looking for new markets, they have an estimated 4000 year supply of Granite here. It descends down 12 miles! So years ago they came up with Granite bowling alleys, and built one. We borrowed a kid to demonstrate, and he got pretty good. the word from the PBA was that 'you couldn't put any english on the ball", so it would not hook. This is the one and only!