Pumpkins

As soon as Molly got up this morning we hustled and loaded her into the car (along with all of her stuff) and got on the road. It was the annual Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival and we've heard that traffic is notoriously bad. We were pulling out of our driveway at a quarter to eight... yes, in the morning... and were on our way. N suggested we take Highway 82 and cut over to Highway 1 south of Half Moon Bay rather than deal with the headache that is Highway 92. It was a windier road (which I'm not a fan of because I do get car sick), but it was the right idea since we didn't hit any traffic.

We were parked and heading towards the main strip just before the festival was to start at 9:00. Did a couple laps around the first section of booths and checked things out. I picked up a cute lady bug fleece beanie for Molly from the Dinky Dimples booth and got a free sample of some environmentally friendly dish soap from the Mrs. Meyers truck. We then hooked up with Jarrod, Jennifer, and Robert and headed over to the Half Moon Bay Library for the costume contest. There was a little boy dressed up as a pirate sitting in a wagon decked out as a pirate ship and then he had his little sister that was dressed up like an octopus hanging off the side. Not to mention the little boy in his NASA space suit riding around in his wagon decked out as a space shuttle. Once the kids started to get a little bored and fussy we decided to take off since clearly we weren't even in the running for any prizes. Who knew heavy construction was involved?

When we got back to the main street it was packed. SUPER packed. We headed straight for the food court and scored some awesome eats. N started off with some pumpkin pie (hey, all in the spirit of the festival he tells me) and polishes that off with some pumpkin ice cream. I went another route and scored some very yummy marinated artichoke hearts and got a corn dog. After that we attempted to find the pumpkin carving guy, but the map we had wasn't very accurate and we headed in the wrong direction. The crowds were crazy just to walk in, forget about it when you add a stroller to the mix. We finally regrouped on a side street and decided to head down to the hay bale maze (about 6 miles south) that our friend Barrett told us about. We had seen it on the drive in and the maze looked quite impressive.

The hay bale (or hale bay as I kept calling it) maze was located at the Arata Pumpkin Farm and it was awesome! Sure, it was $5 per adult, but soo worth it. At first we just let Robert lead as he had some excess energy he needed to burn (Molly had passed out in the car on the short trip and was zonked out in the Bob Stroller). He was actually doing pretty well and then us silly adults decided to take a crack at it and hit dead end after dead end and kept ending up back where we started. We finally came across some dude in a cloak with some sort of goat head thing and he handed a very concerned Robert a golden mini pumpkin. He was also standing in front of a hay door, but wasn't saying a word. After a bunch of us were gathered (there was just another dead end past him) we started to think he was the way out and we also started to talk about the fact that we could easily take him. Apparently that was the trick because the door opened and the exit was found.

Molly woke up just in time for some pictures in the pumpkin patch and some walking (still with our help) in the lovely dirt. The parents were starting to get hungry again so I suggested a late lunch at Alice's Restaurant up on Skyline and 84 on our way back. We sat on the back deck that overlooked a nice grass lawn that the kids were able to run around on. It was an absolutely gorgeous day.