Open Doors

Today I took everyone on an Open Doors adventure, they were not enthusiastic.  We had many events to choose from including a lot of church and museum options but as it was a lovely day again we went to an orchard specialising in cider making and a herb farm.

At the cider orchard there were even more strange gourds than at the roadside stall outside Exeter.  I'm sure that this sort of thing must have inspired weird fairy tales and things.

As for these, yuk

There were also 7 sorts of cider to try including a familiar tasting scrumpy and some very good ice cider.  There was a bbq, a scavenger hunt, fresh apple and cinnamon doughnuts,a nature trail and lots of people getting quite jolly from the tasting.  There was even a remarkably Englishy gift shop of the type that you might find in a garden centre, the only thing that really marked the atmosphere out as Canadian was the rock compelation cd that was playing instead of some morris dancing or something (and it wasn't raining).

The herb farm was less interesting (and there was no free booze) but the kids found a good pile of straw to jump off

and these flowers reminded Tom of the Clangers.