Trip to the sugar bush

Today Max, Darwyn and I took a tour of a sugar bush at my sister-in-law's suggestion.  I've never done anything like it before and it turned out to be a really awesome time.  We started by taking a horse drawn wagon ride to the bush.  When we arrived we were invited on a tour of the bush.  I worried this would be boring for the kids, but the tour guide was excellent.  He made the information very accessible and Max and Dar both listened with rapt attention.

Dar and Max in the horse drawn wagon.  

They started by tasting maple syrup sap.  I think the point was to demonstrate that the sap doesn't taste nearly as good as syrup, but my kids loved the sap and wanted to drink directly from the pail.  They also had some awesome visual demonstrations of how the sap turns into syrup, (including the sugar content of both sap and syrup) that were very easy for the kids to understand.

Next we learned about the history of maple syrup harvesting by walking through a bunch of displays that moved you through time.  I've included a few pictures below, but I kept forgetting to take pictures and don't have pictures of all the different stages....I think the kids liked how the Native American's made maple syrup best because that involved pulling a hot rock out of the fire and dropping it into a hollow log with sap in it (see picture below).  The rock made a fantastic sizzling display when the guide dropped it in.  The kids were fascinated and are now begging me to recreate the experience at home :)

Making maple syrup the Native American way.
To boil it you had to keep adding host rocks from the fire.
  It took 3 days to turn this amount of sap into syrup!

A native American spiel and "bucket" for collecting sap.

Dar and Max walking through huge vats of maple sap.

A modern "pot" for making maple syrup.
This one is still wood fired, but apparently burns so hot that you can melt a nail.

After the tour we got to try out a bunch of fun activities.  The kids (actually me and a member of the staff) sawed the end off a log using an old-fashioned two person hand saw.  They also got to play on a retired tractor (which they spent a great deal of time "fixing"), feed some farm animals and "tap" maple trees using an old fashioned hand drill.   We walked through the maple bush for awhile and it was a great chance to discuss all the tubing and the ages of different trees.  The kids especially liked counting spiels in each size of tree and noted that the really little trees weren't tapped.  It was a real challenge though, to keep them from hanging off the tubing!  To them it looked like a jungle gym of ropes.

Look what "I" did with the saw mom!

These goats really liked us....or maybe it was the food

Cute picture....too bad about the angle of the sun.

Max and Dar on the tractor.

We topped the experience off by having some pancakes and trying the different grades of maple syrup to decide whether we liked light, medium or dark best.  Before I could stop her, Dar grabbed the whole jug of light maple syrup and took a swig.  When queried about her favorite later, she declared that she liked the light one best, because it had the most.

Darwyn enjoying a pancake.
Notice the size of the maple syrup jug from which she was chugging maple syrup.

The only down side of the morning was that we didn't get to try maple taffy.  This upset Max the most, as many of the other children there were wandering around with the stuff.  Unfortunately it cost $5 to buy and they only accepted cash.  All I had was plastic :( On the bright side, it has given us an excuse to try making it at home!  We will keep you posted on how it turns out.

On the wagon ride back to the car the kids got to sit up front near the driver.  They loved this and laughed out loud at every bump.  (Max went on at great length to the kid beside him about how we couldn't buy any toffee because we didn't have any money.)  Part way home they stopped at a barn to switch the horses and the kids thought this was a bonus.  They watched the whole process with great interest.  When the new horses were brought out the driver told us "the one on the left is Billy and the one on the right is named Spirit".  They spent the rest of the ride home arguing with another child about which horse was the left one and which one was on the right.  

All and all it was a great trip!  It exceeded my expectations.  Thanks Sue for the great suggestion.