After an evening of swimming to our heart’s content and Grand Isle State Park, the next morning we woke up for a big breakfast of French toast with fresh strawberries and locally produced Vermont maple syrup! Our meal gave us the energy we needed to break down our camp, which our campers have become experts in over the last week.

We said goodbye to our cozy campsite at Grand Isle and headed for Shelburne Farms, an amazing nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring and cultivating a sustainable future. The working farm sits on 1,400 acres of forest and National Historic Landmark.

We started the day with a parade of chickens at the farm, where our intrepid travelers had an opportunity to pick up a very friendly chicken named Pearl. We learned about how chickens can help make a closed loop system on a farm by eating any vegetable waste that gets produced.

After we hung out with our feathered friends, we met one of Shelburne Farm’s big Brown Swiss dairy cows. We learned about what keeps cows happy (about a bathtub worth of drinking water a day and about a hundred pounds of food!) and how a happy cow will produce around six gallons of milk in a day. Some of us even had a chance to try milking the cow!

From there, we got to try some delicious cheese that they make on site, and a few of us bought some treats to take home! Speaking of cheese, we grilled up some grilled cheese sandwiches in the shade on the farm before attending an awesome “Raptors In Residence” program, where we got to meet a couple of beautiful owls, including a barred owl and a screech owl, and had a chance to ask questions and have an up-close look at these amazing predators.

After Shelburne Farms, we piled back into our cars for a road trip to Jamaica State Park, where we got to swim in the West River to cool off, followed by an awesome Fourth of July party with state park-friendly fireworks, pizza cooked over a campfire, and cake!

— Claire & Clay