yum. maple festival.

It would appear that the main purpose of the Maple Festival is to eat:

• buckwheat pancakes with syrup
• maple-glazed donuts
• fresh pork rinds
• BBQ
• maple candy
• maple funnel cakes
• kettle corn
• all the various baked goods you can think of
• deep-fried oreos

First stop was at the local Ruritan club for our buckwheat pancakes with fresh local maple syrup and sausage with Uncle Charlie and Frances.  Thankfully, we were travelling with masters and were wisely advised to start the day early.  As a result, we only had to wait for our pancakes, both buckwheat and regular, for about 15 minutes which is short by local standards.  I wasn’t totally sold on the buckwheat pancakes but the syrup was tasty.

Visiting sugar camps in the countryside is one of the other main attractions of the festival.  So after breakfast, we all headed over to our first sugar camp of the day, Southernmost.  They weren’t making syrup but it was pretty and they had the best donuts.

 
And the last ingredient of the festival is the crafts fair in Monterey.

It gets really crazy busy so when we found a spot, we took it and walked the rest.  After checking out all the various crafters and waiting forever for lunch, we headed out into the country to visit a couple more sugar camps.

The first sugar camp was Rexrode’s which is an old school one man operation – very cool.

Sugar maples are kind of odd looking.  Most trees are tapped with rubber hoses these days as opposed to hanging buckets.

The evaporation table.  Will outside the sugar shack.

They have one tree tapped in the traditional manner.

After stopping there we drove just a few miles down the road to Puffenbarger’s, a very modern sugar camp – it had been rebuilt recently due to a fire.  They actually use modified diary equipment to “milk” the trees.

At some point in the afternoon, we simply pulled over to the side of the road and enjoyed the beautiful breeze and the sounds of the South branch of the Potomac.

It was a fantastic day.  We even managed to get sunburned.  Folks told us that the weather was the best anyone could ever remember having for the festival.