Shelburne Farms

Shelburne Farms in Shelburne Vermont is one of the most beautiful places in the world. We found it a couple of years ago when we came on one of our normal Labor Day camping weekends. That year, Hurricane Ernesto had frightened all of our camping buddies away. Which left us with time on our hands and so we drove up Route 7 in Vermont. We found some fun things - the best of which was this beautiful farm. Thousands of acres of rolling green hills and three or four buildings. On our last trip that I've been posting about already, we visited it again.

This tractor comes by the parking lot and we all climb in the trailer. A nice person offered to take our picture (Gregg was visiting his clients in Burlington) .

Then we start driving over the trails, up and down hills,

Trees, hills, and grass everywhere. . .

Sheep too :) Soooo pretty!

Then you come up over this one hill and there is this amazing building. The first time we saw it, Alaina and I thought it looked just like a castle!!!

Such pretty towers and woodwork, and it's huge!! You drive into this courtyard through a stone wall between the towers . . .

And then the driver of the tractor tells you this is the barn, of all things!!! I can't wait to see the other buildings like the Horse Stables and the Manison (now an Inn) that we haven't seen yet.

While you're at the barn you can go into one side of it and see how they make cheese with the milk from the beautiful Swiss Jersey cows on site. Then there's an area where the kids can dress up like the workers they saw with the cheese and try to make thier own version with pretend curd and rakes and boxes.

You gather up the 'curd' (corks for the kids) and squeeze as much as you can into the boxes and stack them up. They sit awhile (the real ones have springloaded doors that squeeze all the whey out) and then it eventually turns into cheese. The kid version had blocks of wood labeled like Shelburne Farms' real cheese for the kids to pretend they made.

Back outside we got to feed the sheep,

Pet the goats, sheep, cows, see the baby pigs and their huge mother, Garrett found a turkey feather near the turkey pen that became his trophy for the weekend, we got to look for eggs from the roaming chickens,

And MILK the goats!!!!!
Everyone tried it - Becca thought it was sooooo cool, but she really wanted to milk a COW, a BIG COW. So you can imagine how thrilled she was when they called us over and . . .

Everyone got to milk the cow too!!! Garrett passed on this though - the goat felt so weird to him he wanted nothing to do with the cow :).

Becca however was in heaven! She loved it. She still talks about getting warm milk on her hand and tells us what other things she sqeezes at home feels like the cow did, for instance; playdough, yogurt tubes . . .

Dad called and said he was on his way so we sat in the field to wait for him and watch the horses,


And then rode the tractor trailor thing back to the parking lot. Someday we'll go and spend the whole day so we can walk around some of the trails, find Lake Champlain, see the Inn and the Horse stables . . .


I know this seems like nothing new in New England where we're surrounded by farms and grass and trees every where, but this for some reason is a magical place for me. It's so serene and beautiful - can't explain it, I just LOVE it!!!