It was a beautiful Maple Syrup Saturday

I hope you had a wonderful weekend! Ours was fun, we finally got out side to enjoy some of the spring weather. We spent some quality family time visiting several local Maple Syrup sugar shacks! Our friend joined us with her kids and mom so we made quite the group! The first shack we stopped at was a tour of an operation that uses reverse osmosis and tubing to process and collect their sap. It was interesting but not really the prettiest thing to see woods full of plastic tubing. The syrup tasted yummy though! At the second place we had lunch, FREE pancakes with sweet maple syrup, and orange juice! With a donation of $2.00 our family of four ate good :)
The best we saved for last. Hurry Hill Farm was a little bit of a drive for us to get to but so worth it. After I made everyone stand in line for half an hour we got to ride the hay wagon out to the sugar shack, which I would say was about 3/4 – 1 mile into the woods.

The sugar shack looked as if it had been there forever! We didn’t get a chance to go in because there were so many people. We did get to sample some free Maple hot chocolate and then paid $1.50 for a Smith’s Maple dog with maple mustard YUM, that was one of the best hot dogs ever!

The kids had fun poking around the creek edges while we finished up our dogs. I’ve got an “almost” smile out of my teen in this one :)

Gotcha! Super Genius looks like he belongs in the woods doesn’t he! This reminds me, While we were standing in line waiting for our hot dogs there was this woman waiting for the wagon to come back up. She was dressed well, had her short blond hair done perfectly, flawless make-up, little flat slip-on shoes. She’s yelling across the muddy path to some people, friends??, that she was waiting for that wagon, she was “going back up to civilization!” getting out of this place and “going to salvation!”. She was gonna go shopping at  the museum instead. LOL! My friend and I just look at each other, the kids look at each other, my hubby looks at me, we all roll our eyes and thank our lucky stars we enjoy being out in the woods during a muddy spring day!

Perfect tree for a picture. I think the kids were more interested in the trees then the syrup.

The boy scouts had a nice set up to show how the Native Americans and early settlers used to collect and boil down sap. They did a great job explaining and I hope they get a good badge for it!

My friend Leann got in on the action. The younger scouts were demonstrating how to tap a tree using this old dead one. Everyone took a turn but Leann was our fearless leader and went first :)

The girls were pretty much running on a major sugar high by this time and we having a great time! Headed back to the wagon to get “back to civilization”! lol

They had a very nice 3,000 square foot museum full of all kinds of old sugaring equipment. The kids got to make a few crafty items at the different stations they had set up. Of course we left with yummy treats, tired feet and happy hearts. Not bad for a 6 hour day of mostly free fun!