Last of September....

Our local oracle (the lovely neighbours) told us that at this time of year people go apple picking in the valley.  This sounded straight forward enough, and when in Rome we went apple picking :)  There are several big farms that seem to be set up just for this time of year.  The one we visited was Noggin Corner Farm Market. we did check it out before we left, so were looking forward to corn mazes, duck races, kettle popcorn and a good old game of washers along with the obligatory cart ride to the apple fields.


I've never done a corn maze before and was quite prepared to get completely and utterly lost.  We paid our entrance fee and were handed a (very handy!) map and pointed to the start of the small maze and the flag pick up point for the big maze (wave your flag when you get lost and they will come look for you).  The excitement levels when we headed into the small maze were astronomical.


The kids had a treasure hunt to complete - 6 animal stamps - and paper clutched in hand went tearing off into the maze all gungho.  Needless to say we needed some of Matt's fabulous directional abilities to get us to all 6 letter boxes and back out again!

We collected our flag and headed into the big maze..  I'm glad we took the buggy, I'm sure we would have lost Amelia without it!  It took ages to complete the maze - after an hour or so we had given up completely on trying to find our way around and were relying on Matt with the map to get us to the next checkpoint!  Enthusiasm had waned considerably by the time we got out! Great fun though - would have been interesting to know just how far we walked...

We refueled and the kids played on the great tyre stack and the culvert piping slides (slightly corrugated which made the slide a bit uncomfortable but surprisingly fast!  Owen and Amelia enjoyed the washers game (throwing big washers into a box - a bit like horseshoes I guess...) and everyone had a great time playing with the water pumps at the duck race :)  After we had climbed every hay bale and pumped every pump we gathered up our gear and headed for the apples.

We were all packed into a big wooden trailer and driven out to huge apple orchards where we were just advised to 'pick what you want'.  We tried a few but ended up with a bag largely containing royal gala!  The kids were getting a bit scratchy so we picked quickly and headed back.  The tractor took us past the pumpkin fields - Halloween pumpkins purely for decoration of course!  People were lugging them around in big wheelbarrows :)

Good wholesome family fun!  No animals - unless you count the pumpkins :)