Mayfield dairy trip

This past weekend the family and I went to the Mayfield dairy farm in Braselton, GA.  We packed into the car and drove to Mayfield dairy to take a tour of the facility and see what production looks like behind-the-scenes.  In case you are not familiar with Mayfield's products, here is a photo of everything they offer:

They mostly offer dairy products such as milk and ice cream, but they have started to include tea as well.  To talk about some of the history, it all started when Mr. Mayfield bought a farm solely-raising  Jersey cows.  He quickly found that the milk from Jersey cows had a wonderfully creamy taste incomparable to milk from other cows.  In fact, this taste is what consumers responded to, and Mayfield milk grew to have such an increasing demand that other products followed. This brand is one that was passed from generation to generation in the Mayfield family line.

To go back to the beginning...

We started our day with the drive.  There was such a sense of excitement in the car because we all knew that we would end the tour with ice cream!

Nevertheless, it was nice when we pulled up to our final destination:

We made it early that morning around 10:25 because we thought they had tours every thirty minutes.  But, it turns out they changed the formatting a bit and now have tours every hour.  So what do you do with two kids when you have a little over half an hour of time to kill?  Why, check out the place and take pictures, of course!

This is the main area of the facility.  It is a quaint wooden building with rocking chairs set out on the front, and a window to order ice cream.  There are also picnic tables with folded umbrellas for shade.  To the left is a BIG cow (more pics to come), and to the right is a beautiful space filled with various trees, flowers and plants.

Though the Braselton location is called a "dairy farm" there are no live cows on the property (boo).  We thought there would be, but no.  Mayfield processes milk that it gets from thousands upon thousands of cows from it's contracted farmers.  So a more adequate name would be a milk processing plant.

This is Maggie the Cow.  She is a stuffed cutie that greets all the visitors!  You can kind of see the gift shop peering through the right there.  I didn't get any pictures of the gift shop, but it is FILLED with all kinds of trinkets and paraphenalia.  I ended up buying a magnet for my refrigerator.  It's a little tradition we started in our household when the hubby and I got married.  I have always noticed refrigerators filled with dozens of adorable magnets, or witty sayings.  Instead of filling our refrigerator with lots of magnets that don't mean anything to us personally, we wanted to get one magnet for every place we visit.  That way, when we look at our fridge, it stirs memories of that particular trip inside of us!  Right now, I think there are about 10 or 12 magnets on our fridge, but each one is special, and holds a special place for us!

Alas, the big cow!  Here it is in all it's glory!  My littlest one was scared of the cow, but my son thought it was amazing, and right after I pretended to milk it, he did the same thing.

After all of the picture-taking, we went inside for the tour.  There were no pictures allowed once the tour started, so here are a couple of the waiting room:

After the tour we got exactly what we were waiting for--ice cream!!  I got the lovely turtle tracks, with chocolate covered caramel-shaped turtles in vanilla ice cream, while the hubby got praline pecan.  It was absolutely delicious!!  I didn't get any pictures of the ice cream, though, because we were diggin' in!

Overall, it was a nice informative excursion for the family.  The tour didn't cost any money so that was a plus.  We only ended up spending money for gas to get there, ice cream for all, and a magnet.  However, being together on a weekend with beautiful weather was, as they say in the Mastercard commercial, priceless.

Stay sew-filled!