Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries

Hi Kids,
This is Evergreen Beach Lodge in Ephraim (pronounced ee-frum), Wisconsin.  It's in Door County.  Do you have a United States map in your room?  Can you find Wisconsin?  Do you see that kind of little pinkie finger sticking out into Lake Michigan?  That's Door County.  this is the hotel where Miss Elaine and I stayed -- it's over 100 years old.  Here is a view of Lake Michigan from our hotel room.

Miss Elaine and I were here to learn all about Montmorency (mont-more-EN-see) cherries.  Door County is the fourth largest producer of these bright red, tart cherries in the United States.

This is me sitting in a cherry tree.  The average cherry tree has about 7000 cherries on it.  That's enough for 28 cherry pies. 

We ate cherries right off the tree and we had cherries fixed lots of different ways.

We had cherry lemonade.















We had cherries and pecans on French toast.

We even had cherries on steak!
One of the coolest things we did was take a cooking class.  The school was called The Savory Spoon.  Do you know what savory means?  Can you look it up in the dictionary?  Janice Thomas owns the cooking school and she was glad I came to class!

We did a lot of the cooking.  We divided into groups.  Miss Elaine and I worked on the salad.  The dessert group made crepes (kreps) filled with cherries.  Crepes are thin French pancakes.  That group put cherries in the middle of each crepe, then folded them over.  Miss Janice put them in a pan on the stove and poured sauce over them.  Then she set the sauce on fire!  That's called flambeeing (flam-bay-ing), another French word.  As you can see, it was pretty scary.  Miss Elaine and I will not be trying this at home!

We did do more than just eat -- or cook.  This is my friend Nicole.  You can see she's dressed warmly.  Wisconsin is much farther north than Oklahoma.  Even though it was summer, the nights and early mornings were quite cool.  I was glad I had my fur coat!

There are lots of interesting towns in Door County.  This picture was taken in the town of Sister Bay.  There's a restaurant there with grass growing on the roof.  Can you tell how they mow it?  Those are goats!  Every morning, they put the goats up on the roof and they bring them down at night.  It's not a very good picture of the goats -- but it's awfully good of me, don't you think?

Have you ever seen anyone ride a Segway?  They have two wheels and a motor.  You make them go by leaning forward and you stand straight when you want them to stop.  It's a little scary but Miss Elaine and I had a really good time riding one.  We rode by lots of cherry trees and into the woods and to the top of this hill where we could see Lake Michigan in the background.

I loved my trip to Wisconsin.  I hope to have lots of travels this year to tell you about!

Your friend,
T. Bear