Living where I do, in New York’s Hudson Valley, I find that my locovore, foodie, and travel interests become intertwined, especially when I’m confined to traveling at home. I never thought I’d be into agritourism (I have enough trouble getting my own tomatoes weeded, thanks), but exploring my adopted home is opening my eyes to the attractions of traveling to the farm.

This is largely, I think, because the locovore and Slow Food movements have integrated within them the concept of story: the stories and the people and the places behind the food we eat. A loaf of bread might include not only the ingredients, but a short history of the idealistic baker whose dream was realized in this fresh, locally produced loaf. Buying produce at a farmer’s market often means an in-depth conversation with the farmer about the dirt that makes her tomatoes so darn tasty. And a hunk of cheese might be named after the cow its milk comes from.

At least, that’s the case with Sprout Creek Farm, Hudson Valley home of fine cheeses, a kitchen classroom, and lots and lots of really happy cows, goats, and pigs. (Not that they produce any pig cheese, but the pigs are there snorting and snoozing in the sun.)

We’ve been buying Sprout Creek’s cheese from our local grocery store, co-op, and through an organic farmstand for several years, but even though I checked out their website over a year ago we never managed to make it across the Hudson River and up towards Poughkeepsie. (Okay, it’s less than an hour’s drive, but if traveling doesn’t involve at least a 6-hour flight, I can be damned lazy.)

Autumn in the Hudson Valley is almost disgustingly pretty — the leaves, the cool, not-quite-sharp weather, the lingering light over tan fields of mown hay and corn stands. It’s perfect for driving. I might be all for public transport and wish I never had to own a car, but autumn-perfect days call for country rambles in your own auto. So we went.

Sprout Creek produces both grass-fed cow and goat cheeses, from the sharp Touissant to creamy Brie-like Rita (yes, from Rita the cow), on a 200-acre working farm in Dutchess County, New York. It started, we were told, not by a passion for fantastic cheese, but as a working teaching farm. Although its cheeses are getting wider notice and distribution, the farm’s focus is still on its educational programs. And you’re not talking one harvest festival for the kids per year. The farm is host to some 5,000 schoolchildren every summer, with high school kids getting a residential agricultural experience and day programs for younger kids.

I love places like this, and the services they provide to children, even if I don’t necessarily need it for my own son (we’ve got itinerant goats who give more than enough trouble). It’s just as crucial for kids to have an understanding of where their food comes from, as it is for them to touch other cultures in the big, wide world out there.

You don’t have to be a resident schoolkid to appreciate the farm, though. Any visitors are welcome to visit the animals. People separated from the goats and cows and pigs only by unobtrusive fences. Various signs around the property give information about flora, fauna, and the harmonizing layout of the farm.

Sprout Creek also has a weekend rental cabin for your normal adults wanting to escape the city for a few days. The farm is one of those peaceful, pastoral places. Well off of any many roads, it’s quiet day and night and offers rolling views over fields and herds so placid you almost wonder if you’ve wandered onto a period movie set.

But mostly there’s the cheese. The market offers a cheese-tasting counter where you can try pretty much anything the farm is currently making, including some experiments and several that my local stores weren’t carrying. We went home with Lizzy, a sharp hard goat’s cheese, and Eden, a more buttery aged cow’s cheese. Plus a hunk of smoked Ouray. We would have gone home with a lot more if we could have eaten it.

With the knowledgable staff giving us directions to the best lunch places nearby, and their invitation to bring a lunch next time — although the farm lacks a cafe, picnic tables on the grounds offer an awfully nice place for an outdoor snack, great for a toddler to roam around between bites — we knew we’d be back for frequent visits.

There’s a reason agritourism is becoming increasingly popular worldwide. Places such as Sprout Creek offer an escape, an educational visit, reconnection with nature, and good food all on one beautiful piece of property. Whether you live in a city or in the country, I recommend you look for similar places for a day’s outing — and share your finds with the rest of us!

I was hearing sounds that I couldn’t identify, but this didn’t entirely surprise me.

I was standing in the garden at Läckö Castle, on Lake Värnen near Lidköping,  in West Sweden. I’d just gotten off from the red eye flight from the United States and I was in that jet-lagged, grainy-eyed, brain-riddled-with-bird-shot place where even ordinary things don’t make sense. It was a struggle to get my bearings, standing under a porcelain blue sky in the shadow of largest medieval castle in the Sweden. I was at a reception, in fact, so I attempted to make sensible conversation while I balanced a glass of white wine and a bowl of soup just made from long green beans plucked from the vines crawling up the garden wall.

And then came the sound. It was a disembodied female voice, coming from somewhere just out of sight.  It was something between singing and shouting, urgent, slightly mournful, wordless, melodic and quite loud. After a while, I was introduced to the source of the sounds, a woman in jeans and a windbreaker named Moa Brynell, with a wide open face, and blue eyes and a halo of wisps of platinum hair.

She explained that she was calling to the cows   — performing herding songs called kulning.  It’s a form of Scandinavian folk music, used not only to summon the herd from the pasture, but also to scare off predators. (Men sing kulning sometimes, but it’s mostly a women’s type of song.)  Moa offered to give me an impromptu lesson. She said it was useful to know how to use your voice as a tool — to scare off wolves, or any other creature on two or four legs that might threaten.

We walked up to the castle’s  stone-paved castle courtyard, and I could see why Moa had selected this for our lesson – terrific acoustics. She explained that we must relax our throats, that screaming, as opposed to singing constricts the throat and tires the voice quickly.  We took a wide stance and started.

Pooooooooooooooooooow!

She had us hit a tone that was somewhere in the mid-to-upper part of my range, which i held until I was almost but not quite out of breath.

“You don’t feel it in your throat?” Moa asked me. And when I said no — I was trying to start the sound in my stomach –  she was pleased.

Sih-coooooooooooooooooow!

We repeated this a few times — I laughingat the end of each of my calls from the sheer pleasure of releasing so much sound after such a long journey — and we went on,  until one of the enormous castle doors pushed open, revealing a young woman who looked much amused by the sound and the spectacle. The last tour of the day was going through the castle, and she asked us to stop for a few minutes –  and our beginner’s cow calling wasn’t a welcome soundtrack.

We walked back to the garden. Moa explained that she used to use a version of these calls to find her children when they were shopping, in a mall.  She demonstrated a very melodic call that lasted about three minutes.  “When they hear that, they know to come right away,” she said. I asked whether her children answered with a similar call, and she said no, they came quickly and quietly, as they were embarrassed.

Moa is quite known as a Swedish folksinger with several CDs, one of which she gave me, as well as an invitation to attend one of her kulning workshops – she was offering one the next weekend at Govinda, a vegetarian restaurant in Gothenburg. I’d already committed to be elsewhere, but the next time I’m back in Scandinavia, I certainly intend to take up my kulning studies again.

Earlier this week, Sheila highlighted some of the best places to view Fall foliage but here in the Southern Hemisphere, we are heading not into Fall but into Spring.

So, instead of colourful autumn leaves, we are seeing fields of daffodils, flowering cherry trees, and flowers that lay dormant throughout winter wake up and blossom.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s no better place to view this springtime experience  in New Zealand than at the Christchurch Botanic Gardens.

Situated right in the heart of the city, the Christchurch Botanic Gardens is like a diverse living plant encyclopaedia, featuring over 10,000 exotic and indigenous plants, spread over 30 hectares.

It’s full of twisting and turning paths, a meandering river, long sweeping lawns, a tropical conservatory, and gardens that offer a variety of plants and flowers. During the winter, walking through the gardens is done as fast as possible while trying to stay warm and dry.

But as soon as Spring arrives, it’s a different story. The warmth of Spring entices us to slowly stroll around the gardens, taking time to look, admire, and be amazed by the colors and fragrances of the flowers on display.

The children run around, playing hide and seek behind the huge oak trees planted over a century ago and throw coins into the ostentatious Peacock Fountain.

 Built in the Edwardian era, the fountain had been dismantled in 1949 due to recurring maintenance problems. Five decades later, it was resurrected but not without controversy amidst locals (one letter to the newspaper described the fountain as looking ‘like a refugee from a confectioner’s nightmare’).

Today, it’s a popular drawcard for locals and tourists alike.

The Botanic Gardens really is the perfect place to relax from the pressures of the world. Take a book, a journal, and a camera and sit by the banks of the Avon river and be entertained by those attempting to steer kayaks and paddle boats.

Maybe even pack a picnic and make a day of it.

But on this spring day, we skipped the picnic and headed over to the Curator’s House Restaurant just inside the gates of the Botanic Gardens, for a light lunch. Once the official curators residence, this 1920s building is now home to an innovative restaurant serving Spanish-New Zealand style cuisine. Everything is fresh, including the herbs and vegetables handpicked from the adjoined organic garden.

And now for something completely different:

Last weekend my family ventured down to Sterling Forest, thick, hilly woods in the lower Hudson Valley about half an hour from our house. We were meeting up with friends at the annual New York Renaissance Faire — or what my husband and I had previously termed “Shit, did you take that exit? We’ll never get out of here; it’s Ren Faire traffic.” Our only thought was to get the hell out of those mountains and away from the weird people dressed in anything from pirate garb to velvet capes.

This year, for the first time since moving to the Hudson Valley, we braved the traffic ourselves, having been invited to a surprise birthday get-together. Knowing that traffic as we did, we left early to enjoy the fair (or faire) before our 2-year-old completely lost it from lack of nap and adequate supplies of milk. It’s a pity he’s a little too young for mead.

Because once we got inside, we entered a completely different world, where mead and ale abound but cow’s milk is hard to find. Almost any month of the year, the drive through Sterling Forest is a quiet, winding, steep interlude for commuters going to and from New York City and northern New Jersey. The grounds of the Renaissance Faire is a toy-like collection of colorful buildings hiding behind a tall wooden fence. But from August 1 to September 20, that fence turns into the town wall of another era, and the road is chock-a-bloc with fantasy enthusiasts and day-tripping families.

It is not uncommon, we found when we parked, to attend the fair in full garb. What kind of garb doesn’t matter so much, although true to the Renaissance period is preferred. There are pirates, kings, knights, wenches, and lots and lots of ample-sized women with corsets pushing their boobs out to here. It’s a sight. It’s fantastic. In more ways than one.

The place is huge, sprawling, and timeless. We had not idea where to go first, so wandered through tree-covered paths with other adventurers, feeling not a little out of place in our jeans and T-shirts and bright green stroller. We stopped at the first active building, a playhouse hosting a nun duo with the wackiest, cleanest religious-themed comedy act I’ve ever heard. In between their songs and pitches for “Redemption Soap,” a huge man dressed as Friar Tuck leaned over with a basket covered in cloth.

“Can your son have a cookie?” he asked. “I made them but I can’t eat them.” I tried not to stare at the rope tied lightly around his brown habit, and leaned back to whisper to him.

“They’re not … special cookies, are they?” Maybe this place reminded me a little too well of Springfest in college, but I felt I had to ask before subjecting my son to illicit drugs. Friar Tuck raised his eyebrows and pretended not to know what I meant.

“They’re Pillsbury,” he assured me. “Just chocolate. Except the ones with raisins. They have raisins.”

John got his cookie, and Friar Tuck set the tone for the rest of our Faire experiences. People are friendly, and engaged in a lifetime’s worth of suspension of disbelief. They are, as so rarely happens these days, having pure, clean fun.

Well, somewhat clean. There was a maypole dance, and stands for archery, dart-throwing, and axe and knife tosses (yeah, I stayed well back from some of those). But there was also a large field surrounded by grandstands full of people watching a life-sized chess game. And, to my English husband’s delight, the man behind “Revenge of the Tomato” (where, yes, people can pay to throw rotten tomatoes at a guy’s face) had a never-ending stock of insults to throw back at the people who never seemed to throw a tomato where it was asked for.

The Ren Faire has jousting, all kinds of music, old-fashioned puppet shows, and all the menial serving wenches you could ask for. This is not an amateur event. The people, young and old, wandering the fair in serving costumes, feathered hats, and belly-dancing outfits didn’t just wander in off the street. They have to audition for a job (passable English accent included, mind) and I overheard that some of the best actors — such as those who play Kings and Queens — make their careers doing this, traveling to different Renaissance Faires all over the country.

Even my 2-year-old had a good time. When he got cranky and frustrated after we’d been waiting in line for food, a belly dancer in front of us kept him entertained by jingling the bells all over her … costume. I hope that won’t necessarily set up his expectations for the women of his future.

It was, I was pleased to find, a whole lotta fun. We laughed, we played, we ate funnel cake and drank mead. We spent very little money (having no need for wooden swords, the aforementioned velvet capes, or crowns of flowers, among the hundreds of other things being sold at vendor stands all throughout the fair), as the entrance fee was only $16.95 and free for kids under 5. That’s a pretty good deal for good, clean, family friendly fun where you can be treated like a lady and children are welcome. Well, almost (see photo).

Looking for a low-key event on the pretty green Hawaiian island of Kauai, especially one that draws plenty of locals?

I found it – the weekly Friday Art Night in the tiny southern Kauai village of Hanapepe (supposedly the town was the “setting” for the Disney movie Lilo and Stitch.)

If you are not into staying in a resort bubble and like to be out and about when you travel, Hanapepe is a wonderful way to explore a laid-back small town that has a special vibe.  No overpriced goop here – pick up a lovely, fresh plumeria flower lei for a mere $5 from a street vendor and join the mellow crowds.

Art Night starts at about 6 pm, and the galleries along the town’s main street stay open late for leisurely wandering until about 9 or 10.

My son and I had a delicious dinner at the Hanapepe Cafe and Bakery – seared ono fish, green beans, a hunk of fresh pineapple and purple Okinawa sweet potatoes that somehow tasted vaguely of coconut.

Okay, I had that and son had your basic kid cheesy pasta. It worked for both of us. His loss for not trying the purple sweet potatoes.

We looked into a few galleries and places like Keiki Kovers children’s clothing and Kamaaina Cabinets/Koa Wood Gallery with colorful Robin McCoy paintings and our personal favorite, the Talk Story Bookstore.

Talk Story was full of used books, but special extras included local products and goodies made in Hawaii and an imperious bookstore cat.

The owner, Ed, was Web-savvy and very proud of his Talk Story Amazon store, which is apparently doing quite well for him despite the economic downturn and the inherent difficulties of maintaining a bookstore that’s a bit off the beaten path.

Although really, the brick-and-mortar store isn’t too far off, because the checkout counter guest book was signed by visitors from Japan, Germany, Virginia, Alaska, New Mexico and Pennsylvania.

Pay the town of Hanapepe a visit, on Friday night or anytime you need some Hawaiian relaxation and good company.

Related posts:

• How to enjoy historic Waikiki hotels even if you can’t afford to stay there
• Barren Haleakala holds a silver treasure
• Travel Green in Hawaii

Just So You Know Disclaimer:  The state Hawaii Tourism Authority through Cilantro Media paid my way to Hawaii for the So Much More Hawaii bloggers press trip, and also paid most of my expenses while I was there, including later reimbursement for the dinner mentioned here.