Friday, February 22, 2013

The Sugar Shack

We want to experience all the new things there are to do out here in New England.  One of our recent adventures was at a maple barn in New Hampshire.  The main attraction at Parker's Maple Barn is their restaurant where they serve their maple syrup.  If you come at the right time of year, you can take a tour of the "Sugar Shack" where they process maple sap into maple syrup. 
 
Some things we learned about maple syrup: There are different grades of syrup.  If there is more sugar in the sap, you get better syrup.  The amount of sugar you get depends on the weather.  The best sap comes when there is a warm day followed by a freezing night.  I realize now why real maple syrup is so expensive.  If the weather doesn't cooperate, you don't get good sap which means bad syrup that year.  Plus it takes a lot of sap to make a little bit of syrup. 

I went with two friends and their families.  Four adults attended our adventure with 11 kids 10 and under.  There were only two girls.  It was a riot.  I can't believe we were so brave!

G-man not too happy about getting his pic taken
The tubs of sap waiting to be processed
The steam in the background is the sap being boiled down into syrup

Tara keeping things to a dull roar outside the gift shop.  What a crazy bunch. 



Monday, February 18, 2013

Skiing In New Hampshire

What is the point of living in a northern climate if you don't go skiing? So G-man, Kiwi and I went along for a short day-trip to a very small "mountain" (really, hill) in New Hampshire to have a go at it.
Kiwi liked it, G-man was OK with it, Daddy needs lessons to be any good. I tried the bigger hill; let's just say that I made it down the hill without any broken limbs. The best part was that the lift tickets were very cheap, so it made the experience much more fun.

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Blizzard 2013

So the whole region was in quite the panic of the blizzard that came last night and today. The schools all closed, most people worked from home, the Governor of MA declared a fine if you were on the road for no good reason after 4 PM yesterday, and everyone was rushing to purchase stuff from the stores.

During the evening, I was sure that this wouldn't be that big of a deal; snow was barely even sticking to the ground, since it was just above freezing. We got maybe 2 inches before we called it a night around 11 PM.

Low and behold, we DID get a bunch of snow.
Kiwi and the deep snow, maybe 2 feet?

So far, it was a GREAT time to be holed up in the house. No electricity issues, no gas issues, no CO due to covered vent pipes. Oh, our neighbor stopped by at 10:30 PM to warn us of CO issues with the deep snow; no worries, we have the CO detectors.

Now for a day of sledding and playing inside!