After morning chores and milking (a little frog hopped down the stairs and into the milking room today!), I went with Valerie to the Saturday market in little town called North Hatley. The town is set around the edge of a lake with lots of large houses, so the Saturday market is mainly for the people who come for the weekend or holidays. It very much has the air of a Walnut Creek or Marin farmers market – lots of people with nice baskets buying their organic tomatoes, flowers, bread, cheese and honey. It’s a sweet little market and I delighted in the beautiful colors of the vegetables and flowers. I bought some delicious caramel sauce made with maple syrup and an onion compote for burgers and steak. Yummy. Some government food inspectors showed up at the market to make sure that everyone was following food sale guidelines. This caused frustration and concern for many of the farmers as they dealt with the clipboard-toting officials. Luckily Val was prepared and there were no problems.
I went for a stroll around town, saw my first Tesla in this part of the country, plus lots of Audis. I got a latte from an adorable cafe/restaurant/wine bar (depending on the time of day) and had a look at the huge, beautiful houses that ring the lake. Many of the houses are on one side of the small road that goes half way around the lake and then they also have the lakefront property across the road from the house where there is usually a small beach cabin, chairs and a dock. Since it is after Labor Day many of the docks were empty. I think my family would love to have a place here! I learned later that it is an area popular with politicians and there are a good number of Americans who own property on the lake.
I went past one house that had several sculptures dotting the grounds and saw a young girl walking down the road knitting! I also saw a dad teaching his son how to fish in the river.
At the end of the farmers market, Val bartered cheese for a variety of veggies, including two ginormous bags of organic corn! When we left North Hatley we passed a little town called Waterville that has one of two alternative schools in Quebec province, the other one is in Montreal. The one Waterville is an outdoor-based school where the parents are very involved, apparently a lot of families have moved this area for the school and to have a quieter more back-to-nature type of life. That sounds like heaven to me.
Val told me a story about some friends of hers that she kept calling ‘liars’. It wasn’t until she said something about court and helping people who were in jail that I realized she was talking about lawyers! 😝
We stopped at a very popular organic cow’s milk cheese company called The Station. It is a very modern, family run company that makes delicious, award-winning cheese. They use all kinds of technology to keep their cows healthy and make great cheese-they have a robot that flips the cheese rounds, a fancy hay drying barn and an intricate crop rotation system. It’s been in the family for almost 100 years and is now run by the great grandsons of the original owner. There is a viewing area where you can check out the cave and see the thousands of wheels of cheese that are aging and a store/tasting room that rivals ones in Napa and Sonoma. Les Broussailles, the farm I’m working on, sells their cheese at the store so people can but a variety of tours of cheese. They had the coolest homemade, organic tiki torches!
When we got home I found that someone had been picking herbs in the garden-what a delicious smell! I spent the afternoon the cave flipping cheese, I’m getting faster at it now that I have more experience. When I finished, Safran gave me some freshly made cheese from the goats I had milked this morning – a great snack.
Now that we are headed into fall, the leaves are changing color, I especially love the gorgeous maple leaf colors.
I had just started helping Rafael with the milking with Safran came in and asked if I’d like to go out and listen to some live Cumbria music and have pizza with him and Chloe. I jumped at the chance and so we were driving to North Hatley, where I had spent the morning, to a delightful place called Caravane, where they make woodfired pizza and do the occasional music or other performance event. It is run by the Colombian family who lives in the farmhouse, they have converted their front living room into a pizza restaurant. There is an enormous wood fired pizza oven in the back. By the time we got there, there was no inside seating available, so we sat on the deck and enjoyed the beautiful evening. There were three dogs, who barked up a storm when anyone would come onto the porch. We sat around and talked about music, travel, religion and lots of other things. When our absolutely delicious pizzas arrived we dug in with gusto. I got the legumes grillés, grilled vegetable pizza. So good!
When the music was ready to start, we squeezed inside, basically standing in the kitchen doorway listening and dancing as the band played. The only woman in the band, I’m assuming she is the mom, played accordion and later played the violin, drum and maracas or similar instrument. She is also Chloé’s violin teacher. The dad, also the pizza chef, played both acoustic and electric guitar as well as a couple different drums. There were three younger men in the band, a bass player, drummer, and clarinet player who also played various other instruments and sang as well. The audience was a mix of people of all ages and styles – 20-something year olds with a ton of energy, older women with relatively frumpy clothes who danced beautifully to the music and men in their 60s and 70s who mainly stayed seated but smiled and clapped. It was so relaxed, what a fantastic evening! The dogs wandered in and out during the show and one even got up on stage briefly. During intermission someone came around with a large bowl for tips – I hope everyone was generous with their donations as it was an incredible show. During intermission we sat outside, many people were smoking and I listened to people conversing in French, Spanish and English. What a cool place to be. It was so sweet for Safran and Chloe to include me. The music ended just before 11 and we made our way back home, listening to the Gipsy Kings to keep us awake.
