The Carousel Museum in Bristol, Connecticut

I just love carousel animals--especially the horses!  So when Ross, Malima, and her sister Vio came to visit us for Easter, we were happy to share The New England Carousel Museum and its wonders with some new victims (oops, I mean visitors!).  We took lots of photos and I hope you enjoy carousel animals too because I intend to post many of them.   ;-)

The museum restores antique carousel animals and occasionally exhibits new ones created by one of their carvers.  This antique jumper has beautiful gold leaf detailing. As someone who gets motion sickness very easily, carousels are just my speed!

The price of admission includes a ride on their children's indoor carousel that is used for birthday parties.  The horses may be small, but we all took a ride!  The Museum also operates the Bushnell Park Carousel in Hartford.

Do you see Lincoln's head on the trappings of this beautiful black horse?

Although I usually prefer the jumpers, this standing horse is one of my favorites.  Its trappings are fairly simple but this horse looks so realistic and majestic.

This ornate horse is actually fairly small in comparison to the others.  Its compact shape was designed for portable carousels that would travel to different fairgrounds--more horses could be stacked and shipped in a smaller container for moving from place to place.  I never tire of looking at these animals!

Maple Sugaring Part 2

As suspected, when my tech experts arrive, the problem with Blogger and the photos disappears!  So let me try again...

We enjoyed our visit to Lamothe's Sugar House to watch the process of making maple sap into maple syrup.

The weather in March was ideal for gathering maple sap:  nights below freezing and days above.

 

Here's Mark admiring the reverse osmosis system that Mr. Lamothe is explaining.

That's Mr. Lamothe behind the steam from the evaporator which is boiling the sap that has already gone through the reverse osmosis system to remove most of its water and is now becoming even more concentrated as more water boils off.  This is the final step in making maple syrup.

 

We wanted to make sure that our California girl could watch closely!  We stopped in the gift shop after the syrup-making demonstration to buy some of the finished product--there's nothing in the world that tastes as good as maple syrup!  In my humble opinion, after you've had the real thing, you'll never want to use the corn syrup imitations again!