Faith, Folklore, and Friends

This is the last day to guess the miles we traveled.  Winner announced on Monday.

In St. Johnsbury, Vermont, this farm boils sap from maple trees into pure maple syrup. It takes up to fifty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. We visited the maple museum there, with dividing tables and a video showing the steps that sap goes through before it becomes syrup. A guide there told me that last winter, her husband worked in waist-deep snow tapping trees.  Apparently, one day of sunshine is all it takes to get the sap running.  It runs best when there are cold, sunny days and freezing temperatures at night.  Once it is warm enough for the trees to start budding, the sap stops running. After visiting the museum, I understand better why maple syrup is so expensive at the store.  If you live in the South, having real syrup is a treat reserved for special occasions.  I may have brought a little bit home with me.

We love to travel and we love the west.  We have made many trips west of the Mississippi, so we thought we should go somewhere different this year.  We set out with a plan to see the New England states. In 1993, I received a fellowship to do some research at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.  So we had seen beautiful Boston and Cape Cod, but nothing else in the Northeast. One item on our bucket list is visiting all the states, and we wanted to mark some off with this trip. We went to Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia,   Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey , New York, Connecticut , Rhode Island , Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont , Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky. The ones in bold type are states we had not been to before. It was all beautiful. How many miles did we travel?  Good question.  Just for fun, post your guesses in the comment section below or on Facebook.  When I fi...