McCall’s ripoff pumpkin patch
Sunday a week ago we went to McCall’s pumpkin patch in Moriarty, about 1 hr from Santa Fe. Originally we thought we would try to go up to Durango again to catch the Great Pumpkin Patch Express, but I changed my mind, because the weather situation was unsure and it’s at least a 4-hrs drive to get up there. Moriarty seemed like a better choice.
Pia brought her baby-bladder and I don’t know how often we had to empty it that day. I guess I’m not telling parents anything new by saying that the urgency to find a bathroom is indirect proportional to the distance of the closest one: meaning - the further away you are from a bathroom, the more urgent the desire to pee. Just past Galisteo we had to make an emergency stop behind some bushes to address one such urgent desire. When we left again, Pia’s underwear was clipped into one of the back windows for drying purposes …
We had NO IDEA how big that McCall-thing in Moriarty would be. Two huge parking lots and even more people. After shelling out $27 for three people we entered the enclosed area. The tickets said that most of the “attractions” were included in the price. What they did not tell you was that it would take quite some patience to actually get to the attractions. Everything had a huge line in front of it. Think “Disney World” with a lot less sophisticated queuing techniques. I’m not talking about kid-friendly 5-min lines, but more like kid-unfriendly 30-min queues …
In defense, there were a few things you did not have to wait for and one of them was the corn maze. You could pick a short, a medium and a long route through it. Pia made an effort to find all the numbered markers on the medium route and 30 mins after we entered the maze, we found the exit.
The temperatures must have been in the mid-70s and we needed to find some drinks and food. The lines at the different food stands were the worst. I think it took us some 45 mins to get from the end of the line to front. To cut the time short, I took Pia to the bouncing-in-a-huge-pumpkin thing, while Katherine stayed in line.
In between bites, Pia would run up a 30-feet high hay stack and when Katherine joined her on one of the ascents, it looked like they were sitting at the front of a boat pointing at the newly discovered land on the horizon:
By the time we were finished with lunch, the waiting times seemed to have increased even more. Luckily we found something that was not as bad as all the other stuff: an artificial hill had two huge pipes embedded. Some plastic covers at the bottom of the pipes had turned them into long, fast “Mine-slides”.
If you plan to visit McCall’s yourself do bring some food, drinks and, most importantly, a lot of patience.
Haha! I am sure that Pia will be so “thankful” that you shared her bladder indiscretion with the public. I can’t get the image of her undies dangling in the wind!
p.s. How goes the push-ups? We’re on week two. I can do a total of 50.
Oops! I didn’t finish my sentence:
I can’t get the image of her undies dangling in the wind out of my mind!
That’s one heckuva story, Tobi! But when it comes to “patience”, you’ve got it, esp with the Pea. I can just see how fun it was for her to come flying out of that pipe! God, she scares me! That little girl is fearless!