You know those Ocean Spray cranberry juice commercials where those guys are standing in a cranberry bog? Well, we've now seen real life wet harvesting of a cranberry bog! One weekend in October there is a cranberry harvesting festival in southern Massachusetts, which I had marked on our calendar during the summer so that we would remember to go. Unfortunately in September we found out that Brian would have to take Friday call that weekend since our vacation for our Knoxville trip was later in the month, so I figured he would be too tired for us to go post-call and scratched it off our our to-do list. But then David and Carroll were going to be in town that weekend and they expressed interest in going, so we all woke up Saturday morning with our fingers crossed that Brian had gotten some sleep during the night. And he had - hooray! Although with Sarah's crazy melt-downs during the whole morning, by the time we were out the door I was second-guessing the whole outing.
Well, I had no idea how crazy-big this event was going to be! It seemed like the whole town was mobilized to pull this festival off. The school lent all their buses to ferry people between the huge parking field and the festival and then on to the actual bog area, the local law enforcement was out directing traffic, and half of everyone from Massachusetts showed up at the festival that day!
Our first stop at the festival was the food vendors. We decided to fill the kids' bellies (and ours) before heading out to the actual bogs. I think Carroll and I scored with the best selection - seafood bisque from Lindsey's Family Restaurant. With every bite we were more and more convinced that the chowder was one of the yummiest soups we had ever eaten and didn't find out until later that it was multi-year winner at the New England Food Festival. The guys and the kids got hot dogs, or something...
On the way to the food vendors, we passed a little train giving kids rides around the festival area (for free!). We told the kids we would ride after eating. Since we could see the train running from where we sat to eat, our meal was punctuated with Sarah's exclamation of "Train coming!!!" every few minutes. The kids were so excited when it was finally our turn to take a ride. Brian also enjoyed it, amusing himself by bouncing up and down to give our car (thankfully the caboose) a very bumpy ride.
One train ride didn't turn out to be enough to satisfy Sarah, as she was screaming "Mon more tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime!" ("One more time", very dramatically) as we dragged her away from the train. But the prospect of another school bus ride may have consoled her slightly.
When we got to the bog, it got REALLY windy and pretty cold. Once again we underestimated the fall New England weather, but the kids seemed fine so the rest of us just rolled with it. Unfortunately everywhere we looked there were lines - lines to go on the wagon ride around the bog, lines to climb up and see the pumping of the berries into the trucks, lines for the port-a-potties and even lines to get back on the busses! We decided the one activity that we would wait for was the wagon ride around the bog, which turned out to be a good choice as we got a very informative lecture about cranberry harvesting during the ride.
There's the flooded bog!
Those are cranberries, ready to be harvested to make juice, jelly and other assorted products. To impart a little cranberry knowledge on my readers, most cranberries are wet harvested. Only the whole fresh cranberries that they sell in the produce section are "dry harvested" because its more labor intensive.
On the wagon ride.
From the other side of the bog, we got a great view of the berries being pumped into the trucks while the water was draining out of the bottom of the truck and back into the bog.
Then we moved onto a heartily kid-approved activity: climbing the sand mountain! Both kids loved climbing and running down this huge mountain... I never found out what the purpose of all that sand was though.
There was more then one bog in this big clearing, and after our wagon ride I realized that the water level was significantly higher then before. Then we spotted the beater machines already starting to work on the bog. The bogs are designed to mainly be gravity fed, so as the upper bog was almost fully harvested, the gate between the bogs had been opened to start flooding this one with the water from "above".
By this time we were all starting to get tired and cold, especially Brian and the children. We rode the bus back to the festival area and bought some apple cider doughnut holes (with and without cranberries in them) to fortify us for the ride home. Another fun and unique adventure for us!
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