An e-mail invitation has me thinking about getting a group together this weekend and going sleigh riding. There’s more than one place within 20 minutes of our house where we could do this, but one of my favorites is the Sugar Moon Farm.

Husband and wife team, Scott Whitelaw and Quita Grey have a thriving maple syrup business in the Cobequid Mountains in Earltown NS. They use these gorgeous draught horses in the sugaring work and in winter, before the sap starts to run, for sleigh rides through the woods. There are also hiking trails for snowshoeing and crosscountry skiing.

We often take friends to the “sugar shack” for breakfast, and sometimes go, just us, if we have a weekend morning available.

In the city, one can just keep warm in winter, at a movie theater or a bowling alley or a mall. Those venues are at least an hour’s drive from here.

Want to sleigh ride, snowshoe, or hike in the beautiful outdoors? No problem. This is the sort of winter activity that is often easily available in the country.

What about you? What kind of winter activity do you enjoy: city or country?

Disclaimer: I am NOT an affiliate of Sugar Moon Farms nor am I in any way compensated by them. I received an e-mail about the sleigh rides from them today and decided to share because I simply love the place!

Technorati Tags: Sugar Moon Farm, draught horses, draft horses, maple sugaring, sugar shack, maple syrup, sleigh rides, all-you-can-eat pancakes, Chef’s night, hiking trail, Nuttby Mountain, Earltown NS, Rogart Mountain Trail

Such irony: on Saturday, I offered a sample of the small things that had given me pleasure in the past week. One of the items I chose was “no traffic lights within a 40 minute drive”.

Yesterday morning, I turned left out of my driveway and almost immediately saw a traffic light on our road.

Read the rest of this entry »

The front page of the daily paper in our nearest town carried this picture last Thursday morning. The picture is in color and measures 7½” x 9″.
As you can imagine, it WAS the front page story. Page 3 continued with the headline: “Tatamagouche sunflower thief has business owners up in arms” over a smaller b&w photo of one such owner displaying the holes in her flower arrangement.

Six years ago, Read the rest of this entry »

Hilary Clinton’s now-famous quote — “I believe in a zone of privacy” — made at a press conference to promote her 2003 memoir, Living History, referred to the media’s exposure of public figures.

But in the country, privacy is about your neighbors. Our nearest visible neighbor is across a field about 150 yards from our house. We lost a couple of trees in Hurricane Juan (2004) and Read the rest of this entry »

For the rest of my week, see my blog at the Grace in Small Things site.

1. A great musical & drama revue.

2. Featuring local talent.

3. Mounted in the village fire hall.

4. For $10 admission.

5. Plastic bins for sorting.

Wage a battle against embitterment and take part in Grace in Small Things .

[tags]village fire hall, North Shore Revue[tags]

Yesterday I left you with the cliffhanger of where we go for our coffee fix, as Canadians with no Tim Hortons coffee shop anywhere nearby.

If we’re on the go, the Needs convenience store has carafes of several kinds of coffee on tap all day. We’ve adopted the local favourite of half coffee and half cappuccino as our usual cold weather drink.

If the situation calls for some sit-down time, Read the rest of this entry »

We moved to the country from a large Canadian city, which statement to any Canadian means we had ample opportunity to get coffee and doughnuts from Tim Hortons*.
So common are these shops, that I’ve even heard a large double-double & a dutchie from Tim’s called the Order of Canada. (In actuality, it’s a large coffee with double cream & double sugar, along with a large doughnut (without the hole) with raisins.)

That the city we moved from was Hamilton, Ontario is a double whammy. Every Hamiltonian knows Read the rest of this entry »