27
Mar
2008
That is a very Alice In Wonderland question -- how is sledding
like strawberries? The answer is: it's rare to fill up on
either. And yet, we have managed to do both things in the past
year!
When it is early summer here, strawberry season shows up and lasts (and I am not joking or exaggerating in the least here) exactly eight days. We have a friend who has about 2 acres of PYO (that's 'pick your own') strawberries. We go and we pick as many strawberries as we can, which last year took about 2 hours and netted us 14 pounds of tiny beautiful strawberries. We intended to make shortcake, and strawberry pasta, and all kinds of great stuff. In the end, though, we pretty much just ate all 14 pounds straight. It is rare to feel like you've really had plenty of strawberries, but we managed. (Not that we were sick of them, mind you. Just wonderfully satiated.)
This week, we decided to make good on our vow to go sledding at the Mt Prospect Ski Area. We learned a number of things:
1) The ski tow lives!! There is a warming hut (a yurt, por supuesto) with a woodstove and everything. We don't know when it runs, or for how long, or what it costs, or anything except that it is hooked up to power and there is a deep groove in the snow where it tows the skiiers up the hill.
2) The view from the top is really pretty. This isn't even the top-top, just the middle-top where we sat down and had some hot tea. We also brought binoculars, so we were able to scope out the cows in that field over yonder.
3) You can totally satiate yourself on sledding. I didn't think it was possible -- I've always stopped sledding for some external reason, like my clothes were soaked, or it was getting too cold, or the snow was crappy for sledding. But sledding here was awesome -- the snow was hard, the sun was warm, and you only had to walk up 1/4 of the hillside to get a long awesome (fast!) ride back down. The only (minor) downside was that sometimes the sled went so fast it squirted out from underneath us and left us in the snow while it rocketed down the rest of the hill.
Whee!
When it is early summer here, strawberry season shows up and lasts (and I am not joking or exaggerating in the least here) exactly eight days. We have a friend who has about 2 acres of PYO (that's 'pick your own') strawberries. We go and we pick as many strawberries as we can, which last year took about 2 hours and netted us 14 pounds of tiny beautiful strawberries. We intended to make shortcake, and strawberry pasta, and all kinds of great stuff. In the end, though, we pretty much just ate all 14 pounds straight. It is rare to feel like you've really had plenty of strawberries, but we managed. (Not that we were sick of them, mind you. Just wonderfully satiated.)
This week, we decided to make good on our vow to go sledding at the Mt Prospect Ski Area. We learned a number of things:
1) The ski tow lives!! There is a warming hut (a yurt, por supuesto) with a woodstove and everything. We don't know when it runs, or for how long, or what it costs, or anything except that it is hooked up to power and there is a deep groove in the snow where it tows the skiiers up the hill.
2) The view from the top is really pretty. This isn't even the top-top, just the middle-top where we sat down and had some hot tea. We also brought binoculars, so we were able to scope out the cows in that field over yonder.
3) You can totally satiate yourself on sledding. I didn't think it was possible -- I've always stopped sledding for some external reason, like my clothes were soaked, or it was getting too cold, or the snow was crappy for sledding. But sledding here was awesome -- the snow was hard, the sun was warm, and you only had to walk up 1/4 of the hillside to get a long awesome (fast!) ride back down. The only (minor) downside was that sometimes the sled went so fast it squirted out from underneath us and left us in the snow while it rocketed down the rest of the hill.
Whee!
