The Corn and Apple Festival

 Morden, MB

Free Corn in Morden!

This morning Donna and I did the 1.5 hour drive to Morden, MB.  Morden is about 20 minutes from the US border just above a city in North Dakota that you have never heard of.  The festival was in Downtown Morden so the streets were closed and we got to see all of the shops.  Donna learned of this festival by reading the local newspaper and the article wasn't about festivals, it was about Morden trying to because an urbanist walkable place.  

Morden has the tree lined streets going on so that's a good start.

Or festival visit started off with the the craziest petting zoo you ever did see.

It's like they got all of the animals in the area and chose the ones that had the smallest chance of biting children or each other and put them in a giant pen full of screaming running kids.

Li'l Sebastian!

We learned a lot about this tortoise from its child handler.  We learned that the pyramids on the back of the shell wear down in the wild due to sand storms.

Once we found the main drag of the festival we had to get our bearings.  

FREE CORN AND APPLE JUICE!  That is what we are here for.

We drove 1.5 hours for a free $0.25 CDN ear of corn.  We walked up to the free corn area but we were an hour early so we had to wait.

We walked through the craft area.  /start sarcasm I am sure these are licensed /end sarcasm.

We wondered if these colorful gals were Mennonites.  Usually you don't see that much party on the lower half when the upper half is so conservative.

We found BeaverTails in Canada!  We have only ever seen them in the Canada Pavilion at EPCOT.

The free corn was a bit crazy at opening

 so we thought we would kill some more time at a brewery

I got a very nice IPA

We ordered cheese fries and they arrived I felt it was a very small serving of fries with cheese but it turned out to be a reasonable serving of cheese cut in the shape of fries and fried.  They were delicious.

We both liked the Marathon Pizza sign.

We visited the Quality Canadian Milk stand.

We received tiny milkshakes for free!

The corn was cooked with a 1916 case steam engine courtesy of the Pembina Threshermen's Museum

The Steam Engine

The machine in back is actually shucking the corn and dumping it out into buckets waiting to be boiled.

They boiled the corn in batches for 8 minutes and then moved to those crates to serve to us.

When the 8 minute boil was done they passed out the corn and then the process started over again so the line moved in groups.

They claim this is the freshest corn you can get.  It was picked this morning and then they say they flash freeze it until it is ready to be shucked.  We couldn't actually confirm it was frozen going into the shucking machine.

But we could confirm that the corn was delicious!  A little oil and salt made it even more delicious.

We left with 3 ciders

And honey as well as chokecherry jam.

We added some more miles to our Manitoba Highways.  We are up to 240 miles now.

We also ticked off a few more County Equivalents in Manitoba.

That was it for today.  If you missed Farmers Market and Thrifting, you can find it via the link.