Fresh Apple Cider and Giant Pumpkins

We have found that Saturday is a great day for finding festivals, and our new home in eastern New York has more fall festivals this weekend than we could possibly attend. So we started the morning early with a trip to Eagle Mills, where they were hosting a craft festival.

Eagle Mills is a neat location complete with a covered bridge, and there was live music and vendors with lots of crafts and food for sale. We don't have room for crafts in our motor home, but we always like local food. We always like the live music too. We were the only ones dancing to the music, but several people made the effort to tell us they enjoyed it. One woman told us, "There should be more dancing, and less fighting." We couldn't agree with her more.

A place named Eagle Mill has to have a mill, and we found the red-painted mill in the center of the property. It's powered by a water wheel, but they don't grind wheat or flour here. Instead, they have a very special apple cider mill.

A truck filled with apples was parked outside, and they were unloaded into a trough that washed them before they were chopped up. Bags of chopped apples were then layered between the cream-colored mats of the press. Then wood was carefully stacked on top to bring it to the height of the press.

As pressure is applied, the apples are compressed and apple cider begins pouring out. In the picture below, we can see the burlap bags of chopped apples now showing between the cream-colored mats. We wish there was such as thing as smell-a-blog, because we would love to share the sweet smell of the fresh apple cider that was filling the mill.

We took a picture of our purchases of the morning. We have already tasted the freshest apple cider we will ever find, and have deemed it the best apple drink ever. We had to look up the difference between cider and juice. We found that juice is filtered to remove all solids, while our cider has to be shaken to keep some of the tiny apple chunks mixed. Our drink of choice is perfectly paired with kettle corn and sugar-roasted pecans. That's the kind of festival purchases we love!

Our next stop was at Sunnyside Gardens, where they were hosting the Saratoga Giant Pumpkinfest. The nursery was having a bang-up business day, as people were buying their beautiful mums by the wagon-loads.

They also had every kind of gourd . . .

and pumpkins for sale. The long tables of fall ornamentals were just begging Denisa to take pictures--and of course she obliged.

There were all kinds of unusual gourds and pumpkins available, but this one deserved a solo picture. We had never seen a "peanut pumpkin" before. The name comes from the peanut-looking covering over the outside of the shell.

But the real stars of the festival were the pumpkins that people had raised and brought to compete in the giant pumpkin contest. These monsters are displayed on wooden pallets in the parking lot. Some of them will weigh well over a thousand pounds. At that weight, they have grown into a different shape than the usual pumpkin.

These giant misshapen pumpkins do make for a comfortable place to lean for some of the younger spectators.

Besides the fact that people love to take pictures with them, why would people go to the trouble to bring such a big pumpkin all the way to Saratoga today? Well, there is over $7,500 in prize money to be won at the Pumpkinfest. The biggest prize ($2,000) will go to the heaviest pumpkin.

This weighing process is no small job. This is one of the smaller pumpkins, but heavy machinery is needed to determine the winner of this contest.

There is also prize money available for the biggest sunflower, and it took three guys to move this entry across the parking lot.

This watermelon weighed over 120 pounds, and it won the heaviest fruit in its category.

Denisa is modeling some of the top contendors in the largest squash contest. It was a day when bigger was definitely better.

After seeing all the pumpkins, we headed north towards the town of Lake George. It is named for the beautiful lake at the center of town, with a view of the Adirondack Mountains in the background.

Complete with tour boats and plenty of souvenir shops, it was a thriving place on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

But we are actually here to visit Fort William Henry. Normally the $16.75 per person admission fee would be too much for our frugal travel budget. But once a year the Smithsonian Magazine sponsors free admission day to any of its participating museums. This just happened to be that day. So we downloaded tickets, and the three of us got to see this historic site for free.

We went on the guided tour, that started with a 12-minute film about the fort's role in the French-Indian war. Then a very entertaining young redcoat soldier explained (and then fired) the gun that would have been used in skirmishes of 1757.

When we moved up to the upper levels of the fort, we also got a step-by-step education on the proper way to ready a cannon for battle.

We had been properly warned to cover our ears, but we all still jumped when that old cannon was fired. We're guessing the tourists around Lake George also noticed that we were doing artillery maneuvers at the fort.

We walked through the rest of the rooms of the fort. But Mark's favorite part was when Denisa tried out the stock and pillory. Typically placed in the center of the fort, the public humiliation was the critical aspect of this form of punishment. Denisa now can consider herself properly humiliated.

Our next stop was in Warrensburg to sample the highly touted smoked meats at Oscar's. We bought all New York grown products for a picnic--smoked turkey and ham, smoked cheese curds, fresh tomatoes and apples. As the temperatures plummeted and the wind picked up, we opted for a picnic in the car instead of outside. Then we drove back through Saratoga, hoping to see this evening's hot air balloons lifting off. We got caught in the traffic with several thousand other festival attendees, but the winds kept the balloons on the ground again. It was probably for the best, as that allowed us to get home before dark this evening. We are trying not to wear out our visitor, or we're afraid she might not visit us again.