Day 5 with Misty

We got up early this morning to take Misty to a Sugar Camp... (in French- Cabana de Sucre). It is a Maple Syrup farm. We had their "All things Maple" breakfast.

We took our Relief Society President Sheila Merpaw and her husband Konny with us! They have become our very good friends here. Her husband is not a member.

                                           

This place is surrounded by a working Maple Syrup Farm. They showed us how they USED to have to collect the maple syrup out of the trees. They used to tap the trees and hang a bucket with a lid over the tap:



There were still some syrup running, so Misty tried to get some:

The sap is clear when it comes out of the tree. Then they would collect it and boil it down in a huge iron pot - which turns it an amber color. They usually did their boiling outside.

And you can see why maple syrup is often so expensive... It takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup!

But today they tap the tree and hook a plastic tube to it.  The tubes are hooked to a suction-type machine which literally sucks all the sap from the tree.

Each time you tap the tree, then remove the tap, the tree seals the spot over so you cannot ever tap there again. You can see all the dark spots where this tree has been tapped.

There are ACRES of these plastic tubing lines running from tree to tree. Because this was a mild winter, it has made for a very short season for the sap running. (I'm guessing that will mean higher prices for maple syrup this year!

This was a cool picture we snapped that morning... it sort of reminded us of the sacred grove pictures you often see with the cool morning mists...

Later that evening we went to the Relief Society Birthday Dinner.  One part of the program was that they had everyone's baby picture up on the board and you had to guess who went with which baby picture. I had wanted to be part of it, but I had not brought ANY baby pictures. I checked with each of our children and no one had any baby pictures of me either. Finally, I thought to contact my brother to see if he had any of us growing up. Luckily he DID!!  I had to laugh at his email, however. He said, "I did find one of you growing up, but frankly, it was a little racy for a missionary picture."   He had found an old picture of me in the summer when..for some TOTALLY INEXPLICABLE reason, my mother had let me run around with no shirt on when I was about 5 or 6.  Luckily, He is a master at Photoshop... so this is the one I used:

I'm not sure where my mom learned to cut bangs... but she LOVED cutting them short. No one guessed my picture except Misty! ha!