Awesome Autumn

It is my favorite time of the year.... the time when I drive all over the state visiting gourd patches.



We hit a pretty lousy patch last Saturday, after the Northern California Renaissance Faire.



The fair was a blast at least. They moved it further back in the year and the cooler weather makes it so much more pleasant. Well, except for maybe that girl who has to smell the horses...



Afterward we went to the Swank Farms Corn Maze. Maybe it was still too early in the Halloween season, but they sure didn't have a lot pumpkins. Those that they had, were really over priced. What they wanted for baby pumpkins was a joke.



They did have this bouncy thing, which is all right, but not nearly as cool as that corn swimming pool at The Nut Tree. Lucky for them they had the best invention since the toast solider cutter.



This BRILLIANT thing though, this is THE GOAT WALK.



Why have your hand MANGLED by those devil mammals, when you can use a machine to feed them?



First thing you do is, put a quarter in the machine and get some goat nuggets. Conversely, if you're a San Franciscan, then you use the San Franciscan Children's Zoo Technique; do not put a quarter in, rather move the quarter mechanism back and forth and wait for food to drop through the slot for free.



The next step is to put the food in one of the pvc pipe ends that has been screwed to the rubber belt, and turn the wench to start the machine.



As you turn the wench, the food will sit in the cup and ascend The Goat Walk. The idea is, that
the goats will be Pavlovian trained to follow it up the stairs.



The first problem is, that the cups flip after about a foot of wenching. Obviously, they need to tighten the belt.



The second problem is that, the goats don't care. They just sit there and wait for someone like Brian to walk over and feed them through the gate.

Oh well....



In addition to a pumpkin launcher manned by a peculiar and not too diligent teenager, they had a shack of oddities, which I do believe is called The Troll Garden.



I was chased in there, after the old hippy working the thing, missed me jamming my dollar into the tacky pirate's woman's bucket. This guy is just lucky we're a fan of Coast to Coast AM, otherwise I would have been demanding my George Washington back.



The coupe de grace (and real reason for coming here) was the corn mazes. Not knowing what the going rate for a corn maze was, we were a bit shocked to learn that this particular maze was $15. While we tried to decide how stingy we were, we climbed the observation deck to better inform our decision.

As we watched people going in excited and coming out bored we realized something. The concept of a corn maze is probably a lot more fun then the execution of the actual maze.



After all, how fun can it be, to be lost in corn for twenty minutes? Ten minutes in I'm sure it's amusing, then you start thinking about what is climbing in your ear and laying eggs, and you just want out.

Swank farms is all right. It isn't pretty, the pumpkins are over priced, and the teenagers running the place are apathetic and most likely bored. That being said, I sure did get a lot of fun for $6. (We launched some pumpkins too, but I left that part of the story out, I don't want to get all rilled up again. It was a bad thing.)

This weekend we're heading to Half Moon Bay for their Pumpkin Festival and the surrounding farms. Now Half Moon Bay; that's a town that knows how to do pumpkin farms right!