Our Guide: A Billy Goat Named, "Fluff"

After driving north from Boston, through southwest New Hampshire and into mid-state Vermont, we arrived at the first stop on our "sugarhouse-trail" : Sugarbush Farm

The drive out to the farm was beautiful:

We were met by our guide, Fluff. Play the video to meet him:

Fluff took us over to a box on the fence where they keep the goat food. Once we put our 50 cents in the honor system box, we had a friend in Fluff for life. His pal wasn't so fortunate...he was still in the pen that Fluff managed to escape from. The family who owns the sugar farm has a hard time keeping those two fenced in.

We then took the MAPLE WALK through the maple groves where the sap lines were hung. It took about 20 minutes and we were the only ones in the grove...just us and Fluff, who never left our side.

There were signs posted along the way with interesting facts about the syrup making process

We saw how the sap used to be collected...in metal buckets

But most of the trees were tapped with plastic tubing. The tubing runs from tree to tree to tree, connecting to larger tubing and running downhill

to the sugarhouse where the sap is boiled down into maple syrup.

We did not see the sap boiling because... (play 8 second video)

We then sampled about 10 different kinds of cheese (jalepeno and cayenne was my favorite), tasted the 4 grades of maple syrup (fancy is our favorite), and tried a BUNCH of crazy kinds of jams and jellies in every combination you could imagine.

We left FULL.

The forest was beautiful and peaceful, but the best part was our little guide who clearly loved companionship. He'd stop and munch on maple leaves on the ground, munch on pine leaves, or munch on the food Trevor had for him, but he was never more than a few feet from us the whole time. This short clip is so cute; he looks just like a little dog!

Leaving Sugarbush Farm, we passed one of Vermont's many covered bridges - this one was over the Ottauquechee River

Next stop:

Bragg Farm

located in East Montpelier, near the center of the state

We drove past the state capital building in Montpelier on our way to Bragg Farm

As the sign says, "Sugar-on-Snow" is scheduled for today - one of the main reasons we're stopping by! We've never tasted it and have heard so much about it. It's popular during the snowy winter months here in maple-sugaring country, but as many sugar houses are done boiling for the season, not many are offering the "sugar-on-snow parties" (as they say), so we're happy to have found one who is!

Bragg's weren't boiling, although their pans were filled with sap - so we got to taste it! It's like sugar water - not like maple syrup at all! It's sweet, but nothing like the thick, super-sweet maple syrup is. That's what the boiling process does - takes out the water and leaves the "sugar".

Turns out the sugar-on-snow here at Bragg was just, "ok"...not even comparing to the kind we had at our sugar house we saw the next day - Easter Sunday! Here, they just poured maple syrup over snow, so it was like a maple snow-cone.

Before we finished for the day, we made one more stop at a sugarhouse further north, near Lake Champlain: Dakin Farms.

It was another hour north, but this time we drove with Bri, having met up with her just after the Bragg Farm visit.

Here at Dakin Farms, they WERE boiling! We smelled the sweet smell and FELT the HEAT. Very hot in their sugar house!

We needed to buy our Easter ham, and Dakin was having a Sugar-on-Snow party, along with live music and maple sausages, with maple mustard, maple baked beans and maple ice cream. Maple everything in fact...

We got what we needed and headed back south to the Trapp Family Lodge.

More on that later...