An Apple (or 10) a Day

 My Mom came to visit for a few days last weekend.  Usually when she comes we end up doing house-related projects the whole time (my Mom is a home improvement genius!) and I end up feeling guilty that I put her to work for the entirety of her vacation.

So this time I made sure that we used the time as a true vacation. I took both Friday and Monday off work and we both had a truly relaxing vacation. 

It's nice to have guests that have already seen the sites multiple times so that we can branch out and do things that wouldn't necessarily be on a normal tourist's list. 

I did have a couple of things to do on my agenda - things I've never gotten around to doing, but have always wanted to do because the weekends are never long enough and there's always too much yard work or housework to be done on Saturdays when I would otherwise be gallivanting around the area on adventures with Blake.

Our first item on the list was going to Butler's Orchard for apple and raspberry picking.  It was a glorious 70-degree day with a clear sky and a slight breeze.  It couldn't have been a more beautiful day. 

Prior to driving up, I had worried that there wouldn't be any raspberries left for us to pick.  But boy was I wrong.  There were still tons of them - we just had to take our time.  We picked two pounds of raspberries (some of which didn't even make it to the car before we started snacking on them).  Hands down the best raspberries I've ever had.

We also got a little carried away picking apples.  We thought we were picking 20 pounds...but...it turns out we picked 40 (!!!!) pounds of apples.  Whoops.

Not quite knowing what we were going to do with all 40 pounds of the apples, we stopped at the grocery store on the way home to pick up pie-making supplies.  We made four pies - baked one and put the rest in the freezer - and had only used one bag of apples.  We also ended up putting together cellophane-wrapped packages to give to our friends and neighbors.  Blake and I have each been eating two or three per day, but we're still only down to 2 bags. 

Now it's a race against time...