Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

The falls rains have finally descended on New England, and don’t appear to be ending anytime soon. We have been extremely fortunate on the trip so far – the only rainy days we encountered in three months were hurricane Hannah in Connecticut, a rainy morning in Chicago, and a few nighttime thunderstorms in Helena. It appears we are poised to double that total in the next week.

We left our campground in Burlington at 9:30 yesterday morning. Our first stop was the Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream Factory in Waterbury, Vermont. The facility offers tours and ice cream tasting. It was fun to hear the story of two high school buddies who dropped out of college and created one of the best known brands in America. The presentation and tour spawned interesting discussions with the kids about product differentiation, branding and community involvement of corporations. We were able to sample a new flavor that won’t be released until next year – triple caramel chunk. Yum.

From Waterbury we traveled east past the capital city of Montpelier, and then southeast to our campground in East Thetford, Vermont, just north of Hanover, NH. The fall colors are really starting to kick in, and we continue to be impressed by the vastness of the forests in the northeast. After dropping the trailer at the RV park and filling the truck with diesel, we drove to Hanover and met Sandy and Jane Fitchet at Dartmouth college. Jane worked for Click for a couple of years doing sales on the east coast, and her husband Sandy is a Dartmouth alumni and runs his own small software company. Their daughter, Margaret, graduated valedictorian from Dartmouth last year and is currently taking a year off teaching English in Japan before she starts medical school.

It was pouring when we arrived at the Hanover Inn next to the college, so we bought a few umbrellas and toured the campus with Jane and Sandy. An Ivy League School, Dartmouth’s 4000 students enjoy a beautiful campus nestled in the mountains by the Connecticut River. The college is located in the town of Hanover, which has a population of around 15,000. If money were no object, this would be high on my list of places to attend college. Apparently when president Eisenhower visited Dartmouth and stepped off the bus almost exactly where we parked the truck, he remarked “this is what a college is supposed to look like!” It was fun to have such knowledgeable tour guides. Sandy’s father also attended Dartmouth, and a portion of the library is dedicated to him. He worked for RR Donnelly in Chicago, and was also an avid collector of books and old maps.

After touring the hockey rink with Sandy, we followed him to their house for dinner. Their home sits on 20 acres in the forest above Hanover. It was built by his father in the 70s and contains some amazing antiques. They have several old maps dating back 400 years, a flint lock rifle from the American revolution, and a letter signed by George Washington. For dinner Jane fixed fresh Maine lobsters, corn on the cob, and homemade apple pie. It was outstanding!

We finished the evening with a movie – Animal House! Apparently the writer attended Dartmouth and did a piece for National Lampoon on fraternity life at Dartmouth. It was so successful they created a movie, but used a fictitious college named Faber. While the movie was filmed at the University of Oregon, the content for the story came from Dartmouth. It has been 30 years since Teressa and I watched the movie – it is a college classic. Sandy provided color commentary during the movie, as he knows almost every line and all the stories behind the story! It was an incredible evening.