The Great CoRnundrum of '09

If you know either me or my mom IRL then you will know that when we get together, hilarity (and a few wrong turns) ensues. What I'm trying to say is, WE GET LOST. Denny was along for the ride too, but he put me in charge of the driving and he took the opportunity to get to know his BlackBerry a bit better.


Before I go any further, let me give you Exhibit A: A map of Georgia with our starting location and our pumpkin patch destination marked in red. 

You can see that we are starting in Statesboro and plan to end up at the dot just to the Northeast of there in a town named Louisville which is not large enough or significant enough to be pointed out to us on this map. 

So, do you think that either of us bothered to look at this map (or any other map) before we left the house? Nope. Did my mom think to ask her husband if he knew how to get where we were going (and let me just say that he actually does know exactly how to get there)? Noooo. That would have been way too easy. All we had with us was the directions from the pumpkin patch's website, which in our defense, they made it seem like their farm was right outside of Augusta. Let me go ahead and make this crystal clear for you. The pumpkin patch is most definitely NOT right outside of Augusta. The pumpkin patch is about 50 MILES from Augusta. Now here is a pop quiz for you: Take one more look at that map. Which way do you think we went? If you guessed that we took Highway 25 all the way to Augusta, you'd be right! (Sorry, there are no prizes being awarded at this time.)  

Their site also said NOT to use a GPS or Mapquest or any other map besides theirs because we would end up on another farm about 10 miles from there. In hindsight, I could have looked up the town on Mapquest to find the shortest way there and then followed their directions. Oh well, just another lesson learned.

We were having a hard time finding the road we were supposed to take and we almost went the right way, but I wasn't sure about it so we kept going straight ahead. We just kept going and going and the next thing we knew, we were being welcomed into South Carolina! At that point, we were about 65 miles from where we were supposed to be and it was almost 4:00. My whole reason for ever wanting to go to this God-forsaken pumpkin patch was so I could take Halloween pictures of Emily, and I could not take pictures in the dark!

There was one thing that made all of that driving a little bit better. I found my own Redundancy FAIL!

Please tell me that you get what is wrong with this sign.

So finally after stopping and asking for directions, we were on the right road to Kackleberry farm and we finally got there around 5:00. There were lots of things to do at the farm, like.......

jumping on the World's Largest Pillow, which was not in fact, full of feathers or cotton, but instead full of air. 

We saw how tall Emily is this fall, and I found out that it takes more to be a photographer than being able to press a button because Denny could not get the entire sign in the picture. (Psst. Back up honey!) 

We swung on a sewer pipe swing, and we had to beg not to be swung off by the big kids.

 

 

We played in a "corn"box.

 

We took pictures with some teeny-tiny, Emily-sized pumpkins. 

 

And we rode on the Cow Train!

 

We walked through the corn "maize" and I realized that Denny is just as good at looking at the camera as Emily is. By the way, if you've never walked through a corn maze, you haven't missed anything. 

 

Emily drove a tractor,

 

posed as a chicken, 

 

and was a sweet little flower with Makayla and I.

I also went down a slide made out of none other than another sewer pipe, and the warning sign about how fast the slide was, was a HUGE understatement. People were getting hurt coming off of that slide. I almost fell down! See?

  

It really was a lot of fun. My sister rode a zip-line and I wanted to too, but it was getting darker by the minute and we still hadn't taken pumpkin patch pictures!

But where were all of the pumpkins? The patch had run out and they had to buy more pumpkins, and they almost ran out of those too! We had to round up pumpkins from all over to be able to take pictures.

 

Now normally, Emily would be excited about taking pictures and would smile her cheesiest smile for the camera. But not this time. She was just not having it. 

  

She wasn't even happy when we presented her with a pumpkin of her very own. I knew I didn't have much longer so we quickly changed her into her costume for some ghost pictures. Are you ready to see one of her meltdowns?

 

So I picked her up and took a few pictures with her, and it was clear that she just wanted to be held.

 

 See how happy she is in Mama's lap? I assumed she was settled down enough to give solo pictures one more try.....

 

 

....but I was wrong. She just looked up at all of us like, "Why? What did I ever do to you?" It was so sad! Picture time was officially over, and after a hayride, so was our trip to Kackleberry Farm. 

IF we had known the shortest way to get there, and IF we had gotten there earlier in the day, it would have been so much better. But now we know what it's all about and we can make better some plans the next time we go.