Focht Family Blog

The last tour of the day was at Cabot Creamery. They have tastings of all of their cheeses once you enter the store. Josh and Timmy decided they needed to pose in the cow at the front door…

And of course we had to have the rare three headed cow…

Once again the tour starts with a movie. This one talks about the cooperative of dairy farmers that contribute to the cheese and the measures that they take to have consistency. Here is the room that the movie is shown covered in the many ribbons they have won for their cheddar cheeses…

Today they were making 50% reduced fat cheddar that was going to the west coast. The difference is that they send orange cheeses to the west coast and the cheeses on the east coast are white. The cream that they remove from the cheese to reduce the fat is used for sour cream. Here is a picture of the curds being stirred….

Here are the sour cream containers coming down the belt and being packaged together…

And lastly the boxing machine that boxes up the blocks of curds…

After this tour we were all a bit worn out and the kids were crashing from the sugar overload earlier. On the way out of Vermont we saw one of the coolest things we have seen since being on the road. Of course the unfortunate part is that I was not camera ready. As we were driving through the back roads getting back to the highway a large black animal came running out of the woods. It was a black bear!! It ran across the street in front of us and was only about 75 feet from us!! I am so sorry I couldn’t get the camera out in time. We slowed down by where it went back into the woods on the other side but I couldn’t see it to get a picture.

The dogs decided that the day had been long for them as well. As we were driving through New Hampshire I looked down to see that both of the dogs were napping and that Dory was using Tinkerbell as a pillow…