From Honeymoon to Halloween
We worried that our honeymoon would cut into our Halloween and Fall time festivities, and yet it turned out to be the best plan we ever concocted. To disconnect from the world, go on an amazing three week adventure, and then to return home to a country knee deep in pumpkin spice was such an exciting time for us.
The day we returned from Africa, we opened our safari backpacks, made a ginormous laundry pile, and pulled out our Halloween decorations. That night we walked to get Boba Guys, watched Hocus Pocus, and ordered orange candles and spider webbing from the internet. We hit the ground running as married women :)
Each weekend we packed with events! Starting off, we went to a pumpkin patch that had the worlds’s largest corn maze. With a map in hand, we tried to find our way out, and it took us 1.5hr to do so. We celebrated with buying 29 pumpkins to decorate our home and our fireplace with.
We then had an incredible time with Jamie’s work friends at Arata Pumpkin Patch, where we did a late night hay maze challenge. Breaking up into teams, we discovered quickly who had a good memory or not. Poor Lora and Miguel - their third time into the maze turned out to break them, and they were stuck in there for 20 minutes, while we got out in 2.5 minutes. We will be forever proud of ourselves. Everyone bought pumpkins afterwards, and brought them to our house a couple nights later for pumpkin carving. Sonja brought incredible molasses cookies, we watched “Halloween” and “The Fog,” and Lora and Scott began producing their soon to be music hit: “Wet Ass Pumpkin.” (listen on soundcloud!)
This year, the Renaissance Festival was ON! After months of praying, we were rewarded with roasted almonds, cold beer, a dirty laundry show, the Queen’s procession, and shopping leather goods and chain mail. It was Halloween Fantasy weekend, so we got to see even more costume play than usual. But it was all very shocking - to be within the past again, where people live freely in a world not our own, talk of the plague, and frollick along with their fairy wings. It produced a glimmer of hope that not all things are lost.
Halloween weekend we spent in Santa Barbara. In Calabasas there is a pumpkin walk called “Night of The Jack,” which will become an essential Halloween tradition. For the better part of two hours, we walked along a path that had hundreds if not thousands of pumpkins carved and lit for our enjoyments. Every pumpkin was carved to represent a scene, whether an underwater world, Jurassic Park, or an alien invasion. Some were celebrity faces, while others were combined to make large sugar skulls or motorcycles. There were fields filled with pumpkins, and some that twinkled and represented the planets and stars. For a night, we were transported in a wonderland of pumpkins.
Santa Barbara was cute, and we had such a blast dressing up with our cousins Meredith and Tyler. We dressed as warriors from WonderWoman and went to a fun outdoor club. During the day we made caramel apples that we are still eating, and ended our visit by stopping and shopping at Solvang. This Dutch town is so sweet, and so much fun to walk around. While we ended up buying Christmas hands towels, we made sure to end the day with a pumpkin patch. And the pumpkins were HUGE here! Which only made us pounce on them and do a photo shoot. Needless to say, this years fall festivities turned out to be one of the best.
