Into His Gourd

As I mentioned in the previous post, there's a lot of excitement around here about Halloween.  So last weekend we joined the festivities in earnest with our annual trip to the pumpkin patch.  We have a local school called Pierce College that started as an agricultural school and maintains a couple hundred acres of its land for farming to this day.  On one side of the campus there is a farm center which hosts a Halloween Harvest Festival, which is a fun place to go and get a couple of pumpkins this time of year.  It's a tradition.  A couple of you have joined us there in years past.  I think Pap-Pap went one year, and Hope another.

I will confess that sometimes I don't always have the best attitude about this.  In addition to the fact that the pumpkins are much more expensive here, I'm not a big fan of paying a lot of money to be around large groups of large people eating fried foods, which seems to be the point of most festivals and fairs.  But both Kiernan and Wendy were excited so we did it again.  I'm glad we did.  The adventure started off on a very good note.  After parking the car down the street (the lot at the Farm Center was overflowing), I joined Kiernan and Wendy in the unbelievably long line for buying admission passes and ride/activity tickets.  I tried to convince Wendy that this was a bad idea, that we should just go to the pumpkin patch area and skip the rides this year since admission was going to expensive and annoying, when a young woman interrupted us.

"So when you buy an admission package you get a number of free admissions," she said, holding out three free tickets.  "And we have these extra activity vouchers.  It's so crowded in there and the kids are just on this crazy sugar high so I figure we'd better get them out of here while we can."  She smiled and handed over the the free admissions and the activity tickets.  Then she turned to go.

Wendy and I stammered our thanks.  She turned to acknowledge us, waved, and disappeared.

"Well, that's that," Wendy said, pulling us out of line and heading for the entrance.

"What was that?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"Who was she?"

"I don't know," Wendy repeated.  "You just saw the first time I ever talked to her."

"You mean," I responded, confused.  "You didn't meet her before I walked up."

"Nope.  She must've just seen three people standing together."

It was so weird, the way she approached us.  The way she started talking to us as if we'd talked to her previously or something.  And then she just disappeared.  The whole thing was like one of those stories about angels at Christmas.  A Halloween angel?  Okay.  I'll take it.

We headed inside and cased the joint, trying to decide what activities to do.  Kiernan immediately opted to spend one ticket on the bouncy house.  He loves those things.  Goes nuts for them.  I think even if we had one permanently installed in our driveway, he'd never get tired of it.  After a few minutes of bouncing he moved to the giant bouncy slide and spent another ticket there.  The picture at the top of this post catches him immediately after hitting the slide a second time (two slides per ticket, don'tcha know).  Then we got some food (an ice cream sandwich for him, popcorn for Wendy, and a frozen lemonade for me) and sat down to decide upon our next move.  How to spend that final ticket?

"I want to do the corn maze," Kiernan said.

Ugh, I thought.  Not the corn maze.  We've never done the corn maze.  To me it looked like this weird combination of dopey and dangerous.  Dopey, because the idea of walking through the corn didn't seem particularly stimulating on the outside looking in.  Dangerous, because there were large warning signs that said variations on, "If you get lost.  Don't panic.  A maze master will find you."  When we inquired as to the cost the girl working the ticket booth said, "If you get lost, just yell for help."

Yell for help?

I tried talking Kiernan out of it, but he wasn't having any of it.  He insisted and soon had swayed Wendy to his way of thinking.  So, we bought thirteen more tickets and headed in.  Once again, I was glad they convinced me.  The corn maze was neat.  Easy enough to navigate and clearly fun for Kiernan.  We got a little game card the size of a postcard that directed us on a fact-finding mission to find signs in the corn where questions about the farm on the card were answered.  At each sign was a hole punch so we could prove we'd found the answer.  We even ran into one of Kiernan's classmates, there with her mother.  It was lovely.  And I've got the slideshow to prove it.

Finally we headed over to the pumpkin patch to pick out a pumpkin and get a family picture with a giant fake pumpkin.

All in all, a pretty cool time.