A fun day at The Elegant Farmer

Yesterday, Mom and I took our annual trip to The Elegant Farmer. It was sunny off and on and that worked great for photos. But get this - We wore winter coats! Yeah, the cold weather has officially hit Wisconsin.

So starting with something yummy...

This one is mine. The girl who was dipping these was mid-slice while asking me if I wanted my apple sliced. When I said I didn't, she said in a surprised way "Oh! A bold move!" So that tells you how many people eat these on a stick.

Mmm... reflective caramel!

Mom had hers sliced:

This is the doorway we walked under to get to these treats. I think it could also work as a good doorway to a haunted house, because I felt like we were walking through a big mouth.

While waiting to get through this giant mouth door, I took some pics of the pumpkins next to me.

Check out this stem!

Of course I have to share a pic of the smilin' barn! This is where you can do some shopping for all kinds of food. There was a super long line just to get in and shop, so we didn't do that.

More shopping could be done in a little building next to the barn. This is the area where I took pics of the chainsaw sculptor doing his thing before. He wasn't there yesterday, but I did find these wagons outside the building.

It's cool to look at three different versions of a red wagon. For those of you who like the rusty and crusty:

There was also an old sled out front:

There are some train tracks behind the barn that you guys will probably remember from past years.

This is possibly my favorite picture of the day. It looked like a ghost train coming toward me in the mist. This is about as close as I'm willing to get to an oncoming train.

A little closer...

I can almost hear the rattling.

I took a few photos of... let's call them train accessories because I don't know what the purpose of the next few are. Maybe you guys can fill me in?

When I got closer, I thought this looked like a creature with a big, open mouth. I'm even seeing an eye now!

Some kind of signal?

Coming around the bend...

To the "Elegant Farmer Station"

A few details on the side of the train:

This shape reminds me of a piece of candy.

I took a few pics on the drive there and back. I'm pretty pleased and surprised with how this one turned out, given that I couldn't see what I was taking a photo of. I was just leaning my arm out the window and taking photos of whatever was behind me. See the little horse?

A few trees were changing.

I'm not entirely sure what this is, but we see it every year on the drive. It's some kind of equipment that's been painted to look like a jack-o-lantern. I'm pleased when I can manage to get a pic of it from the car window.

After the Elegant Farmer, we went to Target and Michaels. I've taken a lot of pics at both those stores this season, but there are a couple more things to share.

I hadn't seen this cool arch at the two previous Targets I'd been to this season.

Mom spotted this whole situation. A terrifying new creature! The Gorilla Spider!

Michaels had a pretty clever mini Halloween town on display. This little building reminded me of something out of the show Grimm. This is the "Monster Hunting Supplies" shop. There are a lot of little details to read on this one.

Hehe. This is one of those things that's funny to me and I'm not really sure why. There's just something silly about bloodsucking gnomes that are only about an inch tall. Note the tombstone: "Gnome Sweet Gnome"

The "Symphony of Screams" was in a little bandstand. Cool bat/skull at the top!

Having a glass of "Full Moon Moonshine"

Skeletons in the well!

Sassy cat napkins giving the side-eye to some cat plates:

Those cat napkins might have to be a part of the After Halloween Haul this year...

So there's yesterday! It was a pretty fun day, wandering from place to place. 🍏

Some very hoppy Christmas traditions

This past weekend was full of Christmas and beer themed activities. As some of you might remember, it's a yearly tradition for my mom and I to go on The Miller Brewery Tour and see the light show. We also visited The Pabst Mansion to see the Christmas decorations.

As you can see, there was a very dramatic sky above us during our time at the brewery. This really added something since we spent a lot of time outside walking to the light show and between buildings.

I thought I'd add a few photos of the moon. Look at those reddish tinged clouds. Does anybody know what that means? Something I like about this picture is how the smoke from the buildings is mixing with the clouds in the sky. It's all sort of the same color so it looks like the clouds are pouring down to the ground.

Something cool happened here. It looks like a spotlight is on the moon. I think I happened to take a photo just as a cloud was passing by.

A few beer themed bikes were inside the Miller visitor center:

I have to get a photo with the giant beer bottle each year.

Here's one of my favorite photos from the light show. There was a rainbow of lights passing by. A neat feature of the show is that the lights blink and move to the Christmas music that's playing.

After watching the show we walked to the historic Miller Caves. The streets were decorated nicely with snowflake lights.

The Miller Inn is this fortress-like building which holds a beautiful bar. The beer tasting at the end of the tour used to happen here.

The historic Miller Caves:

 
These caves are 60 feet underground, lined with brick, and look like tunnels. This is where Frederick Miller stored his beer to keep it cool and insulated. He'd collect ice from the surrounding lakes to help cool the beer.

This photo is a wee bit fuzzy, but it's the best I could capture of the spirit of Frederick Miller. Well, he's more of a friendly hologram that appears in the caves to tell people about his beer. He seems like a ghost anyway. This hologram moves around quite a bit, so this is as clear as I could capture him.

A beautiful stained glass portrait of "The Girl in the Moon" hangs above a door of the stables. This is where we go now for the beer samples at the end of the tour. The Girl in the Moon is a logo for Miller beer.

These Racing Sausage mascots are a familiar sight for those in the Milwaukee area. They were strolling around while people were tasting the different beers.

We had the standard Miller Lite, Redd's Apple Ale, and Frederick Miller's Classic Chocolate Lager that they just bring out at Christmas. The Chocolate Lager was OK. I'm not really into malty beers. We loved the Redd's! It seemed to get a bad rap in the online reviews, which I don't understand. I guess it's a beer/cider hybrid. Maybe the cider people didn't want the beer and the beer people didn't want the cider. I don't know. It just tasted like cider to me and not even hard cider. I wouldn't have guessed there was alcohol in it. Anyway, I like hard cider, I like beer, and I like Redd's.

Onto the historic Pabst Mansion. Captain Frederick Pabst (of the Pabst brewery) lived here around the turn of the century. Isn't this place amazing? It reminds me a little of Stately Wayne Manor (only fancier).

A few more angles:

The chapel which was used as the beer pavilion for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair to present Pabst beer:

I found a photo of what the pavilion looked like back in 1893 when it was representing Pabst beer at The World's Fair:

Anyone who has read The Devil in the White City will be interested in that!

Since I couldn't take any photos inside the Pabst Mansion, here is a video tour of the rooms:

The rooms looked somewhat different than what is in the video. Work is constantly being done on the house and there were glittery decorations everywhere for Christmas. I love touring the Pabst Mansion. It's strangely comfortable for being such a huge, fancy home. But then, I'm really into Victorian decorations, woodwork, ironwork, etc.

I wrote about The Miller Brewery Tour and The Pabst Mansion a few years back. If you'd like to revisit that blog post and read some ghost stories about Captain Pabst, here it is:

The Ghost of Christmas Pabst