Having a toddler is so, SO much fun! Especially now that he is walking and exploring and figuring things out for himself. Which leads us to doing more family activities on the weekend. There are lots of awesome fall festivals going on this month, but we were looking for something low key that would be fun for an hour or so and have us home before nap time. Pumpkin picking was the obvious choice.
Like I said, there are lots of fall festival and pumpkin patches, but they all had an entry fee and all I could picture was lots of people and parking lots. Don’t get me wrong – next year we will be all about that, but if I am paying $10 per person for a festival, I want everyone to have fun and for Mike, it would be too much this year.
I did a little Googling and found Yankey Farms in Nokesville, Virginia which is about 20 minutes from us (but feels like a whole other planet). They have 2 stands, and the pumpkins are at the Vint Hill Road location. At that location they also have prepicked pumpkins, a corn maze, cow train and kid’s play area with a corn box.
It could not have been a prettier day, so we headed over to Yankey Farms. We were there when they opened and grabbed a wagon to head over to the patch. It didn’t take long for us to find the perfect pumpkins since they were all as pretty as a pumpkin could be.
The maze, cow train and kids area were $2 each and well worth it. Poor S. I made him go on the cow train with Mike and from what I gather, they had a fun time. Mike was, as predicted, more interested in how the tractor worked then taking in the beautiful scenery. The ride was about 15 minutes, so well worth the cost.
The play area had a small hay maze and slide, which Mike had no interest in because they had a big corn box with toy trucks. I think this is the best idea ever – instead of messy sand, the box will filled with dry corn. Once he figured it out, Mike kept raking his hands through it.
After about an hour we headed to pay for our 3 pumpkins and it was a bargain at 49 cents a pound. The total cost was about $9, a fraction of what it would have cost if we got a pumpkin from the grocery store. The whole experience was about $20 and we had a tired, happy pumpkin hunter when we got home.