dorchadas | Scarecrow Festival visit (Reply)

In what's apparently becoming a yearly tradition for us,

schoolpsychnerd and I went out to the suburbs to visit my parents and go to the Scarecrow Festival. Much (maybe even most) of our visit was taken up by

schoolpsychnerd and I looking around St. Charles and Geneva antique shops for either a coatrack or a kitchen sideboard, and we didn't find either of those, but we find a cute fox mug and had an opportunity to look at the trees in downtown Geneva, which was good because we didn't get to head down to the riverwalk and look at the trees this year.

It's no momiji, but it's pretty nice.

My parents walked near the river on Saturday and said that the trees down there were disappointing, though. It might just be that there aren't the right kind of trees there to get good fall colors.

Anyway, the main neat thing we did this year other than go see the scarecrows was go to Kuiper's Family Farm at

uriany's invitation. I knew there were these kind of farms around, because my parents moved to the western suburbs decades ago so they could be in an undeveloped area and while there's been some infill, it's still not far at all from their house to farms and cornfields, but I've never been to one until yesterday. It was a lot bigger than I thought it would be--there were two sides, one for pumpkins and one for apples, and while we originally thought about picking apples, we realized that we already had too much stuff to haul back to our apartment, between the new foreman grill we had gotten at a thrift shop and all the White Wolf books we were hauling back. So we went to the corn maze instead.

As schoolpsychnerd said and as I told her I would put here, "It was a-maize-ing!"

I told

schoolpsychnerd a while ago that I used to play tag in the corn fields out behind my house, and her response was, "That's so midwestern!" It was the only opportunity she's gotten to skewer me for my upbringing, and I was excited to show her this great example of our fine civilization, and it was pretty fun. They had set up three difficulty levels--we picked Medium--and being seasoned gamers, we stuck to following the left-hand wall around, which worked great until we started going in circles. Fortunately, we had picked up a "passport" at the entrance that had questions, and by answering them correctly at certain crossroads, we managed to make our way out after not too long.

I'm glad it was bright daylight, because not being able to see over the stalks and the occasional wind that came through and rustled them was were both pretty creepy. It was a lot like the beginning of Signs when it was more about mood before the faith allegory came to the fore.

The view from a bridge in the middle of the maze.

Other fun highlights include a tire pile that

schoolpsychnerd climbed and a slide she went down, a crow in a cage that said "Hello!" to us as we passed (the first time I've ever heard a crow say anything intelligible), and a giant store on the apple side where we got bread mix, coffee, an apple-shaped dish that we can put spoons on instead of resting them straight on the oven, and apple cider donughts. The first donughts I've had in probably half a decade, and yeah, they were pretty good.

The actual Scarecrow Festival was better than last year, with the whimsical category still the best. There was another Minecraft scarecrow this year, though just a zombie and the legs were a really odd shape. I was a little tempted to vote for it until we continued on and saw a Slender Man scarecrow, which I gave the vote to on the basis that it was both neat looking and the scarecrow most likely to actually be scary, especially if we had been alone in a cornfield. There were some other great ones, like the giant straw chicken or the explosion of rainbows, but I didn't take any pictures of them this year.

I also poked around my parents' basement while I was there, but maybe I'll make that another post.

Bonus: another leaf picture: