Cabin Fever at Savage Mill

Savage Mill hosted a Cabin Fever event on Saturday, March 10, 2018. My two sons and I went to enjoy some of the activities. Mommy and my daughter were off at an American Heritage Girls event, otherwise they would have joined us.

Savage Mill

A bit of the interior

We arrived about half an hour before events started so we went to The Family Game store and tried out one of the games in their game room library. The prescholar picked out a game named Zero, which we were a little nervous about. Delving in, we discovered it is an abstract card game where the goal is to score as few points as possible with a hand of nine cards. Cards come in seven colors and are numbered one through eight. If a player has five or more cards of the same color, they don't count for the score. Multiple cards of the same number only score that number once, e.g. if you had three 7 cards they would only add 7 to your score. We enjoyed playing until it was time to go to one of the demos.

Sweet Cascades Chocolatier demonstrated how they handcraft truffles. They showed us an actual cocoa pod and what the contents looked like.

Shaking the bean

He wants to take it home!

The beans inside the pod are held together in a gooey white substance that is removed. The beans are dried and roasted to make cocoa nibs, some of which we tasted. They had chocolate flavor but not very much sweetness.

Beans dried but not separated (no pic of the nibs we ate, sorry!)

They then demonstrated how they hand-dipped the truffles (these had a ganache filling that was hand-rolled earlier) and put special decorations to identify the truffles.

Drying and decorating workspace

Machine that properly stirs and heats the chocolate for dipping

It wasn't a mistake that the lady had a balloon with her because she was about to make a chocolate bowl. The balloon was also hand-dipped and allowed to dry. Once the chocolate is solid again, the balloon is deflated and a nice little bowl is left.

Dipping the balloon

Isn't this a waste of good chocolate?!?

Set to dry

Finished product

The chocolatier also had a raffle for the chocolates and the bowl. We entered but did not win.

Our next event was story time at Books With a Past, which is an awesome name for a used book store.  My youngest son was the target audience, so my older son found a book on the shelf to read for the ten or twenty minutes of story time. The store has comfortable chairs and couches so he was satisfied. My younger son enjoyed the story time but he also snagged a book from the shelf and read a story to himself while he listened to the lady read to the group. She read Ten Rules of Being a Superhero by Deb Pilutti and Charlotte and the Rock by Stephen W. Martin and Samantha Cotterill.

My son is in the back of the group

Rocking at story time

Our next planned event was a game demo at The Family Game Store which didn't start for another half hour. We ordered lunch at Say Cheezz Grille. My elder son had the best grilled cheese sandwich of his life (or so he claimed). My younger son had chicken nuggets with french fries (which he shared) and the most potent barbecue sauce ever. I had the "Oink and Egg"--a sandwich with a scrambled egg, your choice of sausage, ham, or bacon, and a slice of cheese (again, your choice). I had bacon and swiss on my sandwich, a yummy and filling treat.

Great food

We headed over to the game store and tried the demo of Kingdomino, a tile-laying game where players bid on various tiles for their kingdom. The tiles are domino-shaped and have either one or two types of ground on them--hills or pastures or fields or forests and so on. The trick is to get the same type of ground on different tiles touching and to have ground with crowns marked on it. The area of ground is multiplied by the number of crowns in the area (thus a large area with no crowns would yield no score!). The game is fun and quick. We decided to buy the game and received a spare throne for the starting tiles and a cool tower that holds and dispenses the domino tiles. They don't come with the game normally but the store had promo items to give away. Good thing we came early!

Game and bonuses

We were going to buy some chocolates for dessert and to bring home for Mommy and my daughter but the chocolatier is also the grilled cheese place. All the workers were occupied with the lunch rush. No one was working the chocolate counter! So we went home for dessert.

The mill had plenty of other activities at other stores--a children's craft at Aww BABY Organics, earring making at Bead Soup, and painting a pint glass at Rams Head, to name a few. Since I was the driver, I didn't go for the pint glass event since it was free only if you bought a pint of beer (which doesn't come in a take-home container). Maybe if we had stayed longer after lunch I could have gotten away with it but the young one still does nap time and had to get home before too long.

We had a lot of fun and look forward to more events at Savage Mill.