I had seen a posting about this a month ago and told my friend about it. The last one I saw was the month before Covid hit and was really splendid. I was wondering how it had fared during Covid.
So we planned to go for 10AM on the cold, soon-to-be snowing Saturday morning.
When we stopped at the table to pay the entry fee, we saw the t-shirts and sweatshirts were priced really low on sale. There was one sweatshirt in my size left, so I bought it! My friend found a long sleeved t-shirt in her size and got that.
My friend wanted to look at the seller’s side first and this artist’s booth was first. She does stunning work with photography and I found a pretty magnet of blue glass bottles in a kitchen window.
There weren’t but about half as many vendors this year and while they had lovely flowers, there weren’t as many nor very many large ones. So we soon moved onto the show.
The show in February 2020 had lots of displays like this. One even had a water feature. There were lots of the quite elaborate displays with lots of orchids.
This was the Amherst group's main display and the time and care was missing in the set-up.
They had both of the display boxes but they weren’t entrancing as previously.
There were far fewer displays than previously.
Though a group from Cape Cod came the 6 hours to participate in this show.
We did see some really different flowers, some were stunning.
Not a good photo but the orange shades of these flowers was just lovely.
This was one of our favorites, with its white and black attractor element.
This was one side of the Amherst group’s display, the only one really worth capturing.
I did like the textural part of this plant in the main display.
Not a great photo but this plant really caught my eye with all its different colorings and designs.
This was the best display, my friend in the background.
The view from the sugar house
My friend had decided she wanted a sugar house breakfast. I’d not had one in 30 years or more. She had checked out all the sugar houses in the area and decided on Davenport’s in Shelburne, MA.
We discussed taking backroads to “get lost” but she didn’t have a good street map and we didn’t want to go back to get mine. Also the roads in the hilltowns might be bad from the frozen slush storm of 2 days ago. So we decided to take sort of backroads to get there. It started spitting snow when we headed out but it was just very fine snow, making the hills around us look foggy.
Inside the sugar house the smell was delicious! I’d never been to this one so it was fun looking at all the old things they had on the walls.
One of the windows was half full of various runs of syrup.
We went around to the restaurant side and were shown to a table overlooking the sugar house. Now I could really look at all the cool things on the walls.
This is a pretty old family run business and they had it down to a T. Everything was clean and neat, the menu intriguing, and the atmosphere very pleasant.
We each ordered a hot chocolate and then perused the menu. They had gluten free pancakes and waffles using their own gluten free mix. I decided on 2 waffles and added 2 sausage patties for protein.
My friend got the gluten free pancake, a potato latke, a sausage and a fried egg. Everything was really delicious! They give you a tiny jug of 3 oz of syrup to use for your meal and take home. I had half of mine left.
We had gotten there in time to avoid the rush, which was just starting when we left. We headed east on the Mohawk Trail and when we got to Greenfield we went through town and over the mountain by the mills and the canal. My friend had never been that way.
We went through Turners Falls and up on the hill and headed out to Montague. Then down along the Africa side of the Connecticut River, crossed over in Sunderland, and then took Long Plain Road through all the farmland into my town. She’d never been that way either.
We got to my house about 3PM and it was really starting to snow with big flakes. I collected all my stuff and she headed home. I got fires going again, made another hot chocolate and spent the afternoon editing the 50 photos I’d taken.
Another cold night was ahead, so I got the stoves cranking.
On Sunday my brother and mom are coming to visit. I have to make her 2 more cards for her phone number ring and put them on it. I also hope to work on the upcoming bill cycle and maybe even get the end of the year done. Probably not…