Day trip to Pescadero Part 2: Pumpkin patch and hay maze

After leaving the goat dairy in Pescadero, we headed back to the car with our purchases. Before setting off we had a little nibble of the artichoke bread with the fromage blanc. We didn’t eat much, having only recently had lunch, but wanted to try the bread while it was still warm. It was just as good as we hoped.

We decided that just for the sake of variation we would take a different route home, heading north to Half Moon Bay and then taking the freeway. We thought it would be pleasant to spend a little more time on the coast and perhaps we would even stop at a beach and admire the waves and the driftwood.

Just a few miles after the San Gregorio / La Honda Road (the one we took to drive out to the coast), we saw something that caught our eye – the mother of all pumpkin patches.

We had seen plenty of pumpkin patches already. At this time of year, every farm and every supermarket seems to have bales of straw and piles of pumpkins for people to pick through in preparation for Halloween. We’d even stopped at one on the way to Pescadero to find out the closest place to get fuel for the car.

This place, Arata’s Pumpkin Farm (www.aratapumpkinfarm.com), was no ordinary pumpkin patch. It was set up like a theme park and looked like it had been decorated from Sky Mall – the in-flight shopping catalogue full of bizarre things like ancient Egyptian statues for your garden. They had hay rides (with tractors rather than horses), a face painting tent, a mini train ride and faux knights jousting in a ring. Lots of enormous pumpkins. What really grabbed our attention was the enormous labyrinth made of hay bales and guarded of course by a Minotaur.

We decided to tackle the maze and it was much more fun than I expected. It was huge and just as twisty-turvy as all good labyrinths should be. It even had hidden swinging doors made of hay bales. After about ten minutes it started to rain lightly. At that point most of the parents took their kids out by the emergency exits to wait until it dried off so the only people left were the silly adults like us. We kept running into a group of friends chasing each other round and round the maze and their fun was infectious! We found our way out eventually and at that point noticed mud coating the bottom of my new trousers. I scarcely cared – the mud would wash out again and it was fun to be a kid again. We were a bit wet by the end of it – especially my husband who insisted I take his waterproof jacket – so we skipped the beach and headed home, our appetite for fun quite sated.

I must admit find American pumpkin culture quite fascinating. At home, pumpkins are a fairly run-of-the-mill vegetable that you eat. In the US there is an obsession with pumpkins for the entire month of October and then you don’t hear from them again. People do eat pumpkins (though they usually call it squash) but it seems that the vast majority are bought for decorative purposes, often to be carved into Jack O’Lanterns. Every October I get a lot of traffic to my site for people wanting to know if decorative gourds are edible (they wind up on this post). I don’t mind the collective pumpkin madness that happens each October – it’s all good fun and rather charming too!

Same disclaimer as last time – I didn’t have my camera so this is the best I could do with my husband’s iPhone in rather dull weather.

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