Every year we try to take a trip up to Monches Farm in Colgate, Wisconsin with my mom and sister. This year, my mom requested to go there for Mother’s Day, so of course, we did! It takes about 2.5 hours to get there from my home in Naperville, but it is well worth the drive. It’s a beautiful, scenic, inspirational place in the middle of no where basically which makes it evermore special. Monches Farm is owned by a friend of my mom’s (Scott) who used to do the antique show circuit back in the day with her when she was an antiques dealer. My mom was telling Scott that she believes she has been taking us up there for the past 20+ years–and it continues to impress every time. There are a lot of random things there, like a peacock and for instance, but most everything else revolves around gardening as it is a perennials farm with a gift shop that specializes in garden-themed items and dried floral arrangements. Yes, Scott also does floral design like me, except he works in mainly dried flowers, and I work in mainly fresh. His dried floral arrangements are so brilliant in color, you’d almost think they were dyed flowers–but they are not. I did not take any photos of his flowers though, shooting photos inside of a store looks a little too shady (like I am stealing ideas or something) so I just store all of the images in my head instead! You’d think I’d be running out of space by now! Anyways, it was a great visit to Monches and I took some photos of the grounds while we were there…
After our Monches Farm visit, we stopped by Holy Hill…another extremely inspirational, visually-stunning place right down the road from there. When we arrived at the Basilica of Holy Hill, it was very busy because they were having 2 masses in the church and chapel that day. This also made it impossible for us to go inside the church to take photos of the beautiful stained-glass windows, however, my sister and I did get to do something we’ve never done there before: we climbed up hundreds of steps to the top of one of the spires! It was a little scary and very cold, but the views were fabulous! Below are some images of Holy Hill…
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