I had a great 10 days in CT -- a couple with Debbie, a few with the boys and John, and the rest with the boys. I was able to go to a neighborhood basketball tournament that Rainer was playing in. They had excellent coaches and some very good basketball players. Rainer made several baskets -- a couple back to back -- but his team didn't win. BUT, unlike the games I'm used to, there was no booing -- even when the ref called a technical.
C.J. went to a retreat for the weekend (sounded like youth conference to me) so Rainer had a friend over and we played Settlers until the wee hours. It was a lot of fun.
After we picked C. J. up in Rhode Island after his retreat and dropped off a couple of his friends, we stopped at a maple sugar farm. We really had a time finding it -- certainly could have used Jeff's Sally.
I brought some maple syrup back and took some to Nathan when I went to his place for dinner tonight. Michelle said she remembered going to a maple syrup farm but no one else seemed to remember. It looks from the picture with the bucket in the tree that they are doing it the same old way, but this farm has over 15 miles of rubber tubing running from tree to tree and instead of buckets, the tree taps go into the rubber tubing for collection. The processing plant reminded me of Vincent Birch's milking plant.
