Smashing Pumpkins

Cox Farms, where we recently went for baby Claire's seventh birthday, is coming to the end of its Fall Festival.  But what to do with all those pumpkins?  There's only one answer to that: smash them!  Yes, it's Pumpkin Madness weekend down on the farm, where you can watch multiple orange gourds being catapulted into the lake, dropped from a cherry picker, run over by a tractor...if you hate your vegetables, it's the only place to be.

Unfortunately it was raining.  Quite heavily, which meant that the various Americans we'd arranged to meet there chickened out.  Whatever - the Brits aren't scared of a few drops of water!  We managed to park by some people from Manchester, who noted that the weather was exactly like it is every day in that fine city, and trudged across the muddy field to the gate together.

Except that, at the gate, we were told the farm would be shutting in 45 minutes.  Shutting a farm because of the weather?!  If you did that in Britain there'd be no farming!  On the plus side, entry was free and so was all the food, and you could buy a pumpkin of any size for $5, which is good as I need one for when I make this:

A lot of the mud was mixed with straw, so it wasn't too hard to wade around, and we found out that the tractor rides were still going so jumped onto the open hay cart at the back.  We smiled at the colourful cutouts of gnomes and monsters as we drove by, but all the live action witches, trolls, etc. that entertained us the last time we were here were absent.  Hmm.  Two aliens did appear from their crashed UFO but disappeared quickly, as they didn't come from a planet with liquid water so lacked umbrellas.

We were thoroughly soaked after the 20-minute ride, but amazingly Tracy and 3-yr-old Virginia had arrived by that point, so they, Hannah and Pete embarked on another ride while I wandered the dripping, empty exhibits.  The cherry picker did demure to rise and drop several pumpkins for the fifteen of us demanding entertainment, but everything closed at 11am and we all dribbled back out to the parking lot.

Ten minutes later we were in a Starbucks, using two toddlers to scare away people in the bit with armchairs and taking full advantage of staying there for two hours, watching the rain fall outside, for the price of one coffee.  It was a pumpkin spice latte, so it all works out in the end.

Just a normal British summer day.  It actually reminds me of the last time I was at the Glastonbury Festival.



I seem to remember it being more crowded last time.  And dryer.

We're having such a lovely time!  Mainly because that popcorn was free.

Weathering the political storm.

Still happy.  Sort of.

What happens when you drop a pumpkin 30 feet?

Exactly what you'd expect.

Even the pigs got depressed.

Autumn is officially over.