Second Half of Spring Break

Okay, so obviously I am running way behind.

Don't be a hater. :-)

For the second half of Spring Break,

my friend Jenn and I took our four boys

to the Massanutten area of Virginia.

I have found this area to be a fun and inexpensive place to travel.

A nice house can be rented at the Massanutten resort

for a very reasonable price.

Besides visiting the awesome water park,

the impetus for the trip was a visit to Joel Salatin's POLYFACE FARM.

We were going on the "Lunatic Tour."

Campbell, Trey, Chris and Trevor on the Lunatic tour.

If you are not familiar with the farm,

you can look over this website or watch the movie Food Inc.

We were on the first tour of the year

and we were lucky in that it was led by Joel himself.

He is a frequent (about 100 days out of the year) and popular speaker

so we were excited he was there.

We learned about the chickens and their job on the farm.

The Eggmobile was not yet set up for the growing season.

In fact, the chickens had just recently been let out of their winter "hoop houses."

Joel has two kinds of chickens on his farm.

Next we visited some very happy and friendly pigs.

They were reveling in their "pigness"

and apparently were quite happy scratching their itches against trees!

Other pigs were hard at work in "the Pigaerator"-

working to mix the hay and cow manure and buried corn into a fine compost

that would later be spread on the pasture to grow high quality grass for the cows.

Joel explaining the "Pigaerator" process.

(cute kid pic of Joel's grandson teaching another child to swing from the rope in the Pigaerator barn)

Finally, we visited the cows, who were happily meandering and lunching

on beautiful green grass pastureland.

After our tour,

we picked up some fresh meats from the sales tent

and headed on our way.

Just as we left, the rain began to fall as a predicted thunderstorm

began to sweep through the area.

We sighed contentedly as we wound our way back through the mountains

and valleys to our rental house.

It had been a fun and informative tour!