One month later

31 days

One wonderful and adventurous honeymoon in Western Massachusetts...

...complete with a tasting experiment.  Two orchards were in competition.  

Orchard A: Bartlett's

Due to the great reviews for Bartlett's on Yelp, this was our first choice for apple picking. However, to our great disappointment, Bartlett's was only open for apple picking on the weekends. During the week, they only offered sales of their famous apple cider and apple cider donuts. Sad face.  

Orchard B: Hilltop

Hilltop had a great marketing campaign-- lots of ads, seemingly professionally written reviews on Yelp, lots of the agricultural-tourism types of offerings at the "family orchard." Lots of marketing makes us skeptical though so we weren't super keen on going to Hilltop. However, they were the only orchard open during the week.  Resigned face.  So, we went to Hilltop to pick the apples.  Somewhat to our surprise, we actually enjoyed ourselves quite a bit--lots of delicious apples with a lot of variety, great service, etc.  We still had a bit of cynic in us though so we thought, "Well, let's do a test.  Let's see how they compare to Barlett's. Which one has better cider and donuts?!"

Awesome advertising campaign on left; anticipated down-home goodness on right.

Please note:  These are only made with sound fresh apples.  Fancy!!

Side note: Will really liked this experiment. Lora got a stomach ache from the experiment.

And the winner?  Turns out Hilltop had a reason to be promoting itself.  Both the cider AND the donut from Hilltop was notably better than the Bartlett version.  Hands down.  It was basically comparing some of the best cider either of us had ever had to normal apple juice.  Juice not cider.  Bleh.  And the Hilltop donut had a better crumb and flavor.  We left happy.

1.5 weeks of unpacking & washing & organizing the gifts 

People are so generous!  Thank you!!!

Just a portion of the packing materials.  Earth, we love you.  We recycled.

2 days of building shelves to help with aforementioned organization 

Good thing Will thinks about practicalities of building stuff.  As a non-builder, Lora was confident the crafty, somewhat funky shelf made out of pipes and random wood pieces she saw on a blog was totally doable.  Will wasn't as convinced and found a more straight-forward solution-- 2x4's and joining pieces.  It's awesome.  It's strong.  It keeps things organized. Perfect!