A Strawberry Festival

Some of the beautiful tulips.

Strawberries!!!!  A couple of weekends ago Pollo and I took a short trip over to the Peddler's Village located in Lahaska/New Hope, PA. (Or somewhere close to that), to check out a Strawberry Festival.  I was a little confused because it seemed awfully early in the season to have strawberries on the East Coast, but since here was an event with both fruit AND a festival/cute place to see I decided to just roll with it and we went to check it out.The festival is held in early May each year at the very quaint and slightly touristy Peddlers Village about an hour north from where we live.  The website boasts strawberry themed stalls, baked goods, a pie eating contest and an area for vendors.

When I was researching this place I couldn't figure out if it was an enclosed space, or a real place, or some sort of Epcot Center-esque area.  It ended up being all of that all rolled into one, but cute and fun to wander around. There are several restaurants, a historic looking inn, and lots of shops that sell items from homemade candy to antiques and furnishing for your man cave(the shop really did advertise furnishings for a man cave...).  All around the businesses are gardens that were loaded with spectacularly colored tulips.  I'm glad we got to see the tulips in PA, because I seem to have missed them in CA.

We started our explorations by hitting up the artisan vendor corner and had a nice chat with the owner of Razz's Shagbark Hickory Syrup.   Hickory syrup is what you get from boiling down hickory bark and sugar to make into a syrup.  We bought a bottle of the syrup that has a rich nutty/smokey flavor that should go great with pancakes or glazed onto a meat dish.  We admired the tulips and poked into almost all of the cute little shops that they have in the village.  Our favorite and most unique was the Knobs and Knockers store that has little gadgets, cute gift items and lots and lots of knobs and knockers for whatever door you might want to have a knob of knocker.

And the strawberries?  Sadly limited to items from one bakery and strawberry lemonade stands that nobody was approaching because of the bone chilling mist that over took everything for half of the day. Oh!  And a strawberry beer that I had (me!  ordering a beer! ) at lunch time.

Tadaa! I drank some beer!  and it tasted nothing like strawberries. :(

I believe they had a stand selling strawberries, but I saw a guy go past with a flat of strawberries in Driscoll clamshells...from California.  We did enjoy our mini strawberry pie and strawberry pull apart bread and oogled the rest of the bakery case, but thats are far as they strawberries went.

All some type of strawberry baked good.

By the end of the day the sun poked its head out and there was much more spirit of festivities with live music from the community playing and people finally being able to purchase frozen lemonade treats.  Although the Strawberry Festival seems like a front to get people (like us...) to go to the Peddlers Village, we were glad we went to explore and we had a very tasty lunch at the Buttonwood Grill that we would gladly repeat, especially with visitors (hint hint).

Yay!  Sun!

They also sold a lot of pretzels...why are pretzels a thing here??