Vermonters can now "Come Hungry and Leave Happy" tm

It's official: Vermont has an IHOP. Big whoop, you say? Perhaps you were unaware the Vermont was the last state in the union to host the 'House. From WCAX's morning newscast:

"A recession may not be the best time to open a new restaurant...

But the owners are betting that i-Hop at the University Mall will be a winner. The owners spent the weekend training new servers and staff for the grand opening on Tuesday. These customers were specially invited to check it out. At a time when jobs are hard to come by, the new i-Hop has hired over a hundred employees.

Proprietor Sam Handy told Channel 3, "We can bring people in, bring a new business to the area, you know, hire 110 people which gets a lot of people off their feet from some tough times, you know, from being laid off. We can get them going again. It's a little nerve wracking with the economy, but I think it's going to work out really well."

Vermont is the last of the fifty states to get an i-Hop. Although it's a national franchise, the restaurant at University Mall is owned locally -- by the Handy family."

I remember distinctly the shock that set in when I first moved to Vermont from Massachusetts in 2000. I couldn't purchase my normal brands of toothpaste, bread, orange juice or moisturizer, and I lived in the only metropolitan area in the state. I found out that according to the 1990 census there were more cows than people in the state. I now lived closer to Montreal than Boston. The state was in the middle of the nasty "Take Back Vermont" campaign where all the yahoos came out of the woodwork to protest Civil Unions and angry jackasses from the "kingdom" (that's the Northeast Kingdom to those of you unfamiliar with the term for the highly poverty stricken and rural northeast corner of VT) were on the news constantly spewing some of the most vitriolic and hateful language I've ever heard on TV. I had to pull over and throw up when I drove down a road with dead deer strung up in people's front yards to bleed dry before butchering. I learned that half of the state hadn't been on an electrical grid until the late 60's when the first highway went up, and that many of the major roads used to cross from east to west close for the winter since they go through the green mountains. There's even an extra season, "mud season" that happens when the rest of the country has Spring. In short, I looked around at my new surroundings and thought I had made a terrible, terrible mistake.

But it's grown on me over the last 9 years. I still miss Massachusetts and always will, but this is now home. We have no Target, no Ikea, no Ann Taylor, no Nordstroms, no DSW, to only mention a few chain stores I miss, but we do have the distinction of being the only state to not have a MacDonalds in our capitol (nor do we have one in Burlington, thank goodness). All in all, it's a mixed bag. No one accidentally lives in Vermont. You may grow up here, come for college, or move here at some point without much thought, but you only stay because you want to. It is not an easy place to live.

But of course now that we have an IHOP, that may change.