Apples, Pumpkins, Coeur d'Alene?

We try to go apple and pumpkin picking every year. Normally, we go with our family. :( But since we're in a new place, it's just us. We struggled to find a good picking place for a good price. The more commercialized establishments were more expensive and charged for the hay ride out to the pumpkins (along with the price of the pumpkins chosen). So we decided to try our luck at a smaller farm.

We called before hand to make sure of prices and location. We used our GPS to get there and thought it had to be wrong because we were in a normal enough neighborhood, and it had us at a house that looked like it had just been built and yard wasn't done. Turns out the whole yard was a very sweet, retired couple's pumpkin patch and garden. "Pops" let the boys play on his tractor, and he eventually gave Christian a ride. They *loved* it.

Finding pumpkins

Looks like I was doing something intense.

Playing

Not only were they super nice, they were super cheap and gave us a bunch of free stuff. Turned out so fun!

We couldn't find a nice "U-Pick" apple orchard, so we just grabbed a box of apples from this Red Barn store. Ugh, nothing like Green Bluff in Washington. I wanted to make applesauce with this box of apples, but sadly I waited too long and they got yucky.

Well, the GPS sure took us for a ride. We were trying to find this Red Barn place and suddenly we came across this canyon. We decided to check it out. What the heck, right? Wow, when we got inside it was *beautiful*. Pine trees, streams, waterfalls, brightly colored fall trees—nothing like the sagebrush we were in minutes ago. It felt like we had been magically transported to good ol' Coeur d'Alene.

So what do you do when you find a pretty place? Family pictures! This proved really tough. We didn't have a tripod or an extra person to take the pictures. We managed to get a few by setting the camera on a random log.

I enhanced the photos using Lightroom because the originals really don't do the scenery justice. I don't know what I am doing so bare with me:

Blurry but cute

Jesh was making the funniest face to make the kids laugh and smile. In the next series you can see it was so funny that I couldn't help but bust up too.

We sorely need a professional photographer. We had our legitimate family photos taken in Coeur d'Alene by Brady Campbell. Once you've had Brady it's hard to settle for anything else. He is just that awesome.

You wanna hear something funny? As we were driving up the canyon, we almost hit a cow! I'm not sure I have ever seen a cow anywhere but in farm country. Turns out the canyon is like a giant farm. There were cow patties all over the place. It made checking out the area quite risky. On the way back down, we passed the cows again—just moseying their way down the road.

This cow is saying, Yeah—so what? I am a cow! Whatcha looking at, foo!