Sugaring Off Time

 Saturday morning we took off to the mountains for our first maple syrup festival of the season. we were SO excited!  We headed straight to our favorite sugar shack. We like their syrup so much that we included jugs of it in our rehearsal dinner boxes for the wedding.

 It had snowed the day before and it looked like a winter wonderland.  I really got my winter fix that I've been so sorely lacking this year.

 The Blog Tech and my DIL were so excited to see the maple syrup warmer because they had been anticipating this since last year....         (that whole stainless warmer is full of syrup!)

 Hot maple syrup sundaes for breakfast.  You can add as much syrup as you want and the sundaes are free! They had tables groaning with maple treats.  The Blog Tech was too busy eating his sundae to remember to take a pic.

 All of these shacks pour syrup from each boil into glass jars and place them in front of a window so you can see the different results they get.

Here are all of their boils from this year.  You can see that they are very light.  We've had such a mild winter that the trees are budding.  The moment they bud, the syrup stops running.

 Our second stop ws a sugar shack that was on the tour for the second year.

 This is the syrup boiling.

 Here is their run so far this year.

 A Mennonite family was taking the tour.

 We find a lot of these places by following the smoke we see from a distance.

 Click for a closer look.  This gorgeous barn has maple leaves on all of the shutters.

 They had these cute handcrafted replicas of their place.

 I love these trees with the collection buckets.  I might have to make myself one of these.  I'll show more tomorrow.  I've had a crazy busy weekend!