About 70 miles from the West Shore of Lake Tahoe a foothill town lies on rolling acres of apple trees and family farms.
Camino, California, also known as Apple Hill, is little more than four exits off of U.S Highway 50 to the uninitiated. But for hundreds of families in the know, Apple Hill is a day-tripper’s gem. The fruit-orchard community offers pick-your-own apple harvesting tours and pumpkin patches for kids; award winning wineries and a brewery for bigger kids.
On a Thursday in late October my wife and I packed our daughter and her grandma and grandpa into the station wagon and headed down the hill to apple country.
About an hour and a half after leaving Tahoe, we took the first Apple Hill exit, (they’re well marked on 50), where we stopped at a convenience store for a tour map — they have them in stacks anywhere you stop. The map lists sixty stops the traveler of the windy farm roads can make and it occurred to us that next time we should spend the night to experience more.
We stopped for lunch at a farm famous for pulled pork sandwiches. The meal was good, but what made the experience worth the drive was, nightmare to vegetarians everywhere, the view from the back porch of the family-kitchen style restaurant — a whole hog skewered with an iron rod from mouth to tail, roasting over an open flame, its juices dripping into the hot coals as it turned.
 Ahh, fresh pork in the foothills; it smelled a little like bacon as we ate and although it sounds grisly — I was happy for my four-year-old to get the experience of seeing where her food comes from — something we miss by picking up prettied up packages of meat at the grocery store.
My daughter, who seemed very comfortable with the process, saw two little plastic toy pigs next to the roasting snouter. The toys made oinking noises when you walked close to them, which my daughter thought was funny and I thought was a little morbid. Though I didn’t consider vegetarianism until my daughter, in all of her four-year-old wisdom, pointed to the toy baby pigs and then up to the shiny roasted flesh of real one and said, “Look daddy, they’re saying ‘our mommy is burning.’”
Yeah...so what’s the parental come back to that one? The flippant, “That’s right honey, and we just ate their mommy — yum, yum,” or the religious, “Well honey, we were put on this Earth to lord over all of God’s creatures,” the scientific, “You see honey, the protein that we get from the pig helps us to have energy so we can take care of all the other pigs.” All my options seemed a little disingenuous, so I just went with the most honest response possible, “Honey, that’s how they cook the pulled pork sandwiches we just ate.”
I saw her thinking about that one. Surprisingly, a few weeks later she still eats meat.
The next place we visited featured, innocently enough, a small animal farm. Considering our last stop, when we arrived and strolled among the goats and yes, pigs, I felt like a predator with murder on my breath.
 We found the pigpen with two of the oinkers happily munching on some smashed pumpkins. My daughter watched in fascination as we talked about how they looked when they ate. As we watched and talked, a woman walked up to the pen started chatting to us about pigs.
“Did you know that pigs can grow from 40 to 200 pounds in six months?” she asked/told us. “That’s what makes them such a great livestock animal.”
“Great,” I thought to myself, “from farm to table in six quick months.” I was starting to feel a little guilty about my place in the animal kingdom while my daughter laughed at the way the pink animals trotted proudly around their wire enclosure.
The afternoon shadows within the foothill canyons were starting to grow at this point, so we got back in the car and decided it was time to look for apples to pick. It was twenty minutes to five, and we began to notice ‘closed’ signs everywhere. We realized it may be too late to do what you’re supposed to do in Apple Hill.
As my daughter became more and more disappointed I decided to fake it. I pulled over at an apple stand and got her out of the car and valiantly said, “go ahead honey, pick out all the fresh (I enunciated this word) apples you want.”
“But I want to pick them,” she started to whine.
Oh boy, now what. As I leaned against my car in despair, I looked up and noticed that behind the apple stand there were droves of apple trees; with apples on them.
Okay, here’s the parental moral dilemma; this was a no-pick farm, but there they were; hanging — ready to be picked, and I didn’t want my little girl to cry.
I did what any dad would do — no, I wasn’t honest about my mistake of failing to budget enough time to provide for a harvesting tour. I pretended I needed to use the port-a-poddy out back of the apple stand and brought her with me. While no one was looking, I let her pick an apple.
We came back to the front of the store and bought extra apples from the vendor. I considered giving him an extra dollar for my poached apple but I did didn’t want to give myself away.
Discovering dishonesty in myself was one thing I didn’t think I would discover in Apple Hill.
Facts about Apple Hill:
Camino is an unincorporated town in El Dorado County, California, and has a population of 4,961. Nearby cities and towns include; Pollock Pines, Placerville, Diamond Springs, El Dorado, Grizzly Flats, Somerset, Coloma, Garden Valley, Cameron Park, Shingle Springs, and Lotus. The elevation of Camino ranges between 3,000 and 3,500 feet. Camino receives snow several times per year. Camino is a popular area in the fall for apples, it is informally known as Apple Hill. The busiest eight days are the four weekends in October. The foothill farmers welcome visitors all year round, and there are several Christmas tree farms there for people that like to “pick” their own. Camino is located about halfway between Sacramento and South Lake Tahoe on U.S. Highway 50.
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