New England Trip, Day 1--Canada

Friday, April 20, we set out from Toronto for a trip into the north eastern United States.  We wanted to take advantage of how close we were to these states and to the church history sites.  

(This was just a funny sculpture we saw on our way out of the city...)

We had a nice drive through the Canadian countryside and enjoyed listening to our audiobook--we listened to Wonder.  We saw some funny things along the way, like this giant apple!

As we were driving, Paul and I noticed a sign that had "cheese factory" on it.  Hmm...that got us curious.  We weren't that pressed for time, so we decided to take a small detour and see this cheese factory--and hopefully taste some!

We found the small Wilton Cheese Factory just before it closed.  Unfortunately we weren't able to see them making any cheese at that time, but we could see into the room and of course, the cheeses were there to purchase.  

Oh!  And we found out this cool fact from the website:

"Since 1867, The Wilton Cheese Factory operated as a Farmer’s Cooperative until it was purchased by the Jensen family in the 1970s. One of the stipulations of the purchase was that the factory maintain its original name and the Jensen family honoured that request.

The Wilton Cheese Factory and Jensen Cheese are divisions of A.M. Jensen Limited.

The family tradition of artisan cheese manufacturing remains our primary focus, and ensures our old fashioned, full bodied natural flavours. Our "Old World Curing Process” was set down by Arne Jensen in 1925 and is still closely followed today.

Each cheese has been made with the utmost care and attention to ensure a premium product for your palate. Taste why we haven’t changed a thing!"

We thought that was pretty neat that we found a cheese factory owned and operated by a Jensen family!

Since we had been driving for a few hours, we decided to let the kids run around and play.  Just down the street from the cheese factory was the Wilton playground.  Since the weather had finally started to warm up a bit, we took advantage and played in the warmish sunshine.  

There was this tree on the grounds that had a lot of trunks going in different directions.  We thought it was cool, so we had to climb in it and take a picture.

Not only did we buy some cheese, cheese curds, lime and ginger jam, and some honeycomb, but we also got little surprise bags for the kids.  They were filled with different candies and small toys and such.  It helped to have these in the car, to entertain and bring joy when the road seemed long.

While we were driving, we noticed some semi-trucks with the name Thibault on them.  That's my grandparents' last name!!  How fun!

We saw a beautiful sunset as we were entering the outskirts of Montreal.  We didn't go into the city, but instead headed south into Vermont where we spent the night.  That's a new state for us!!

(Oh, and we thought it was interesting how the street lights looked in this part of the country.  I don't know if it's like this all over, but they don't look like this in Toronto.  And it was clear that we were in the French part of Canada...all the signs were in French.  We noticed driving the other direction--west--the signs were in English and French, but here they were just French.)