Wow. Today. Was. Amazing. Today was basically a perfect summer's day. The sky was an unreal almost photo shopped-looking blue, accompanied by outrageously fluffy marshmallow cotton clouds. The breeze was ideal; cool and gentle, it wound itself around the trees and my head, blowing the hair out of my face. The sun was shining and birds were chirping. The beauty of all of it almost made me forget about the eau de Cow Poo invading my nostrils...
**(Just a heads up-- there are going to be a ton of pictures in this post! (; )**
It was a perfect day to go to a farm. Since this weekend was the last real "free/chill" weekend of the summer, (the rest are taken up by vacation/school prep stuff) Mom wanted to take a fun day trip out to a dairy farm in Maryland. The drive there was about an hour long, but it didn't seem long at all with the beautiful scenery to take your mind off of things. The drive was INCREDIBLY scenic. Rolling hills, tree covered mountains, and amber waves of grain. All of it made me realize what a gorgeous, fragile world we live in. And it's beauty like this that makes me want to spin around in happiness, roll in a patch of wildflowers, and believe that everyone in the world is good.
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| Some scenery out the car window |
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| Scenery from the mountain we drove on |
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| More scnenery |
And then we were there.
South Mountain Creamery was amazing. Admission was free-- we got to see the cows being milked by machine. They were all lined up similar to the way cars are in a diagonal-ish lined parking lot if you know what I mean, and the automatic milking machines were chugging away. It was quite a sight.
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| The cows lined up in the milking apparatus |
After watching this for a bit, we headed over to the barn where the baby cows were kept. 4pm was feeding time, and the farm allowed the visiting public to feed the cows! While we waited for 4pm to come, we strolled around the stalls and pet the cows-- there were a lot of children around and it reminded me of a petting zoo. All the cows in the barn were babies, ranging anywhere from a day to two months old. We found out that one of the calves was born yesterday! They were all so cute... and as we reached out to pet them, their mouths found our hands and licked/playfully nibbled on us. You could tell they were hungry.
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| The calves had long sand-papery tongues! It felt so weird but they were so cute! |
The barn was filled with primarily calves, but there was some other livestock around as well.. There were chickens/roosters (the fowl was free-roaming, so everywhere you turned practically, there was a random chicken/rooster XD) as well as goats and ducks.
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| Candid goat shot... XD |
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| Chicken apocalypse! |
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| DUCKY O>O |
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| Gorgeous brown calf... she was so sweet, too! |
Finally, it was feeding time! and the people there to feed the calves were each handed a quart-sized bottle with a large rubber nipple on top. We were to choose a calf and feed it one bottle The calf I happened to choose must've been ravenous because she tugged and sucked so hard on the bottle, she almost took it from my hands.
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| I hold on to this bottle for dear life as the calf practically sucks it out of my hands... XD |
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| Albert feeds his calf of choice |
In addition to feeding the baby calves, we also made a stop by the chick pen where we saw the baby chickies and looked at eggs inside an incubator. The chicks were SO FLUFFY!
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| THE INCUBATOR! *dun dun dun...* |
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| The chickies scampering around under a heat lamp |
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| He's a fluffy little guy, isn't he? ^_^ |
We walked around the farm some more and the little ones played on a cow-themed playground. We also observed some adult cows grazing in a pasture.
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| Cow-themed playground! |
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| Cows grazing |
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| MOAR COWS :D |
After we were done looking around the farm, we stopped by the little store they had on site where they sold their own meat and dairy. They featured a ton of cheese, yogurt and most importantly....
C> ICE CREAM!!! :D C>
We got a pint to share and everyone dug in with spoons. With eight of us around a pint, as you can imagine, it went pretty quickly. We had a delicious snack of peach ice cream (YUMYUMYUM) outside in a little picnic area-- it tasted so fresh! And it was even more amazing because it was an excellent way to enjoy the outdoors. After we finished the ice cream, we headed back to VA to look at some more scenery and then ultimately get something to eat. We ended up eating at a Chinese place, and I can feel the caffeine from all the hot tea I drank kicking in. I have a feeling I'll be up rather late tonight...
It was a fantastic day-- filled with cows, family, and God's creation. I am thankful for every minute of it.
I wish every summer day were this beautiful.
xoxo
