 Ummmm… See more cider day photos… |
With a cool, crisp bite to the air and the apple-pie flavored Plug-in (Kris loves these doodads) wafting traditional fall aromas through the house, we decided today might be a fun day to take the kids apple picking. (Don’t tell my brother-in-law Jerry, who runs an orchard down in Massachusetts and for whom apple picking is a duty, hard labor and the thing that keeps him from fishing on fall Saturday afternoons. For that matter, before kids, I never found pick-your-own-anything to be fun … seemed too much like chores.) Oddly, we couldn’t locate a pick-your-own orchard within 45 minutes of Barre. Seems like when we lived in New Hampshire there were as many pick-your-own apple orchards as convenience stores. I checked the Web and the phone book and came up empty, so if you know of one, let me know.
Happily, instead of an orchard, we turned up the Cold Hollow Cider Mill up in Waterbury Center. For my money, this was better anyway. The apples have already been picked, and you get to watch somebody press the cider (except on Saturday afternoons, I guess). Then you get to drink the cider. And eat fresh baked apple cider donuts. And browse through a big store full of kitschy Vermont goodness. David got to watch real bees adding honey to a Plexiglas hive and Kristen introduced Sofia to the fine art of candle sniffing. (Sofia then went through the rest of the store, sniffing everything from cookie cutters to decorative drain covers.)
And to gild the lily — there’s a wine tasting right next door for Grand View Winery, which is just up the street from us in East Calias. The winery specializes in fruit wines made with local produce, and I tried a bunch, including an extremely dry rhubarb, which was maybe the most interesting but my least favorite otherwise. We brought home a blackberry wine and a sparkling hard cider. We drank the blackberry wine and ate barbecued chicken on the back porch as the sun went down, looking out at the blackberry brambles up on Milkweed Hill. Sweet.
I don’t care what the calendar says. Fall has arrived.
