The Sugar House

Since we were at Parker’s Maple Barn, and because it’s the New England thing to do to visit a sugar house in the sugaring month of March, we did the tour of their sugar house!  A perfect early-spring day for doing so too!…cloudy skies, cool and crisp air, and the delicious aroma of wood smoke wafting through the air.  Wood smoke is my favorite scent!

Spotted in the parking lot.

Colette and friends!

The bewhiskered man that gives the tour is, in my opinion, a New England classic!  Dry wit.  Warm sweater.  Knowledge and skill.  He’s got it all!  And all the while he’s telling us about how it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup, the air is filled with the sweet steam of evaporating sap mingled with the wood smoke aroma.  Ahhh…positively delicious!

The wood-fired evaporators need a lot of fuel to keep them going…boiling, and boiling, and boiling the maple sap to syrup.

A delightful spring tradition!  The first crop of the season has arrived!

Maple Feast

March is sugaring time in New Hampshire.  The sap is running.  The sap is boiling.  And maple syrup is filling the jugs in the sugar shacks.  Such a delicious time of year!  We took our guests to Parker’s Maple Barn to enjoy a hearty breakfast in their rustic dining room.

French toast and waffles were ordered all around the table.  The maple syrup flowed freely!

Good to the last bite!

Snowshoeing

What a beautiful day it was today in New England!  The skies were blue, and the thermometer soared to 50 degrees!  A great day for some family fun!  So, we drove down to Maple Hill Farm and the Beaver Brook Association in Hollis, NH.  The Beaver Brook Association is a non-profit group that runs a 2,100 acre site criss-crossed with hiking trails, offering nature programs, educational events, etc.  The The original farmhouse and barn still stand, as well as some great outbuildings.

The trails on the property are open to the public.  AND they rent snowshoes!  So, for the first time, we all tried snowshoeing.

What fun!  They take a bit of getting used to…sort of like walking in clown shoes.

And you certainly can’t walk as quickly as you could if you were you were wearing regular shoes and walking on pavement or a dirt trail.  But it’s beautiful and peaceful meandering through the woods and across meadows.

We think we covered about 1 1/2 miles of trails in an hour and a half.  By the time we were done, we were quite warm and had worked up an appetite.  Yay, for Colette having made us some hot cocoa and freshly whipped cream!

We’ll definitely go snowshoeing again!  It was a really enjoyable morning!