Cider Mill

Fall around here is kind of a big deal.  All over the place, these little "cider mills" pop up, where they sell apple cider and doughnuts and have different fall-ish attractions for you to see while you're there.  Some places are more adult-geared and have bonfires and haunted mazes and such, while some are more kid-oriented, with pumpkin patches, a petting zoo and that sort of thing.  

So last weekend, we found out which cider mill in our area was the best for kids and checked it out!

It was, basically, awesome.  And the best part: admission and parking were free, so we only paid for doughnuts and cider!

Nikolai loved the animals! He was definitely a little intimidated by them though.

He liked the chickens and pigs ok, but I think the sheep scared him! It wasn't noisy or pushy or anything, but I think the fact that it was twice as big as Nikolai kind of intimidated him ;)

Some lazy billy goats:

Nikolai LOVED the rabbits!  Here he's saying "hi":

And he really wanted to pet and feed them :)

Then, lo and behold, we found a little area with TONS of mini tractors for the kids to ride!!!

Niko tried the big one first but was too short to reach the pedals, so he tried the smaller one next ;)

After all that exploring we had worked up an appetite, so we headed to the "donut hut"! 

In case you can't read that jug up there, it says "Hillbilly Joe says 'It's sooo good your tongue will slap your brains out." HAHA.  Yes. It really says that.  And it was good!  The doughnuts were yummy too--super fried and insanely coated in cinnamon sugar.  Definitely not health food (and we had a major sugar crash later!) but they were certainly yummy!

But the highlight of the trip for Nikolai was definitely seeing a life-size tractor, just like his little one!!!  He saw other kids getting to sit in the driver's seat and pestered us to let him get up too:

All in all, we really enjoyed ourselves, and we definitely think Nikolai will enjoy it even more next year!