I know what you're thinking: "They must be obsessed with apples up there in Illinois!" And you're pretty much right. Fall up here means apple time, so there are apple farms and festivals everywhere you turn. This weekend we went to the Long Grove Apple Fest after a friend of Mom's suggested it. Long Grove is a very small town a few minutes from us where many of the old buildings have been preserved and turned into a quaint retail area. Check it out here:
http://www.longgroveonline.com/The Apple Fest had craft vendors, food vendors, great singers on three different stages, and all the shops were open to check out. Probably the most popular things were the apple cider donuts. You could smell the donuts cooking as soon as you arrived and they smelled good! As a result, the line to get donuts wrapped around the corner! Mom and Dad figured these must be good donuts so they got in line, but just as they did they heard someone say the line was 2 hours long! Thinking that they didn't want donuts that badly, Mom and Dad abandoned the line. BUT right before we left to go home, and as the festival was ending, we looked over and saw that the line was only about 10 people long. We hurried over and got a pack of donuts to take home for breakfast. Earlier, we visited the apple stand, where they had 6 or 7 varieties of apples to choose from, and took home a 1/2 a peck of yummy looking apples. Mom had one this morning that was so red it looked like the apple Snow White got from the Wicked Queen. She said it was really good and, of course, not poisoned.
It's getting pretty chilly out, so I was decked out in some warm, fall clothes to go to the festival. Mom and Dad thought I just looked so cute and they had to get some pictures of me:
Mom was a little disappointed because most of the trees in the garden were still green. The garden is only about 10 minutes south of us but the difference in the leaves was remarkable; that is, until we rounded a corner and found this beauty:
