Apple Picking!

Bored and sitting idly on the floor of our apartment on Monday, Ben and I had the idea to go apple picking. I'd never been before, so we located a farm and called Owen to come join us. The weather was beautiful, all blue sky and breezes. The farm was nice, too - very large and with a cute little tractor-pulled wagon to bring you out to the apple trees.

I have a secret love of farms and farm stands - it's so nice to go out to a cute, rustic little store (probably run by family, or at the very least people who care about their job) and buy fresh food. There's an orchard in NH I love to go to for the same reason, and every week we buy food at Fresh Market, which is also awesome. This time, we walked out with a garlic spread, a fig spread, fresh apple cider doughnuts, and fresh strawberries - in addition to our 10 lbs. of apples (Cortlands, Galas and Macintoshs).

Seeing Owen and meeting his family was nice, and it was a beautiful day off to get outside, but unfortunately apple picking itself isn't terribly long, difficult or interesting. It took us maybe half an hour to fill our 10 lbs. bag, and we were going really slow. It's fun to pick fresh fruit, but it may or may not have been worth the 45 minute ride out there. I have a feeling it's more for the experience, but even that can only last so long.

And, seriously, what am I going to do with 10 lbs. of apples? I already made apple crisp, and ate a few and there's still most of the bag left! Maybe I could make apple sauce, too. I used to do that quite a lot, but I stopped when I went off to college and had less access to a kitchen.






After we picked apples, Owen took us over to Kimball Farm for some ice cream and to walk around the complex. It's amazing how many people were there, and the place looked like a lot of fun - bumper boats, golf, arcade, and they were even had a live animal show so we met Felix the lemur. We ended up leaving earlier than we anticipated, so we had the Zipcar for some extra time. It was a nice evening, so we stopped at the beach to walk around.

Next weekend is the Scottish Highland Games, up at Loon Mountain in NH. It was totally fun last year, so we're going again. I plan on bringing my aluminum mug from last year that guarantees me $1 refills of root beer and cream soda. Okay, okay, I'll probably forget. Hopefully I'll at least remember to get pictures of the sheep dog trials and the crazy Scottish men throwing cabers around.