Despite the fact that it's eighty skrillion degrees outdoors in the sun, it's officially Fall, which (at least around here) is the season for a particular brand of autumnal barnyard revels. Most of these places are pretty much the same. There are pumpkins, usually some variant of bounce apparatus, listless animals to pet, perhaps some sort of giant PVC tube slide done on the cheap, a corn maze, hayrides, a train ride where the train cars are inexplicably spotted like a Holstein cow 50% of the time, and perhaps cider with donuts. Standard.
That's not that interesting, because we've all been there, done that. But today we returned to a place we went to last year, Southern Belle Farm. The reason we went back to Southern Belle Farm is because they have a pick your own flower field. You heard me. PICK YOUR OWN FLOWERS. This...is different!
A few reasons we like this place. One is that, unlike the apple orchard we went to two weeks ago, they don't nickel and dime you for every damn thing. One ticket for admission covers everything you could possibly want to do, unless you want to buy food. Second reason is that it's very well-kept. Well laid out, neat, clean, and (at least on the two occasions we've been there), not crowded. Third reason is that right there. Pick your own flowers.
The flowers are beautiful. I don't know what kind they are (maybe someone could chime in if you recognize them), but there's a giant field of them, organized into deep rows. Flower picking is included in the price of admission ($14 per person between the ages of 3 and 65 years old). You just go in and pick as many as you want to take home. Last time we came we didn't know about the pick your own flowers, so we weren't quite prepared. The stems are pretty fibrous so it's hard to pick them with just your hands, and also we didn't have anywhere to put the flowers, so they were all wilted and dead by the time we got home. But this time I was prepared, boy. I had a bucket. I had cold water . I had garden shears for each kid. FORESIGHT IS 20/20 (is a thing that over-planners should smugly start saying).
Oh, and just this last. On our way to the car, we passed the corn maze. My kids don't want to do cornmazes anymore because the last time we did one we got lost (an anxiety-provoking experience enhanced by the fact that I was actually on backup call that day and anxious about my potential for ready egress already) but I don't think this formative trauma prevents them from standing near corn. (Yet. I suppose there's still time for them to be PTSDed by the Iowa caucus later on.) So I told them to stand amidst the corn and peek their faces out, because that would be a great "Children of the Corn" joke that might be funny...to me. It was a marginal success, if you consider the margin to be the floor. Maybe in addition to garden shears, I should have brought scythes.
(Thanks to Andrew Moore for recommending this place to us last year. We'll miss you, Good Andrew.)
...is a joke that has surely never been made before!
(Sorry John Irving. Maybe if your books weren't so fucking depressing people wouldn't need to make jokes about them to laugh through the pain. A Prayer for Owen Meany? More like A Prayer for Owen SADDIE, am I right?)
(I'll...show myself out.)
Anyway. Where was I? Oh right. Today we went apple picking, because it's fall and the weather is beautiful and there's no way you would know that Hurricaine Irma will be up in our zone by the day after tomorrow. (Though hopefully just a tropical storm by then. Floridian friends, stay safe.) My kids like to pick things (noses, fruit, and scabs, in that order), you know I have a thing about getting out of the house on the weekends, and going apple picking means a higher than average chance of getting to eat a fried apple pie, which was the best thing they had at McDonalds before they decided to change the recipe and ruined my entire life.
(When I was about nine or ten, my family and I went to Paris, where I realized that McDonalds was still making their apple pies there in the old fashioned manner--that is to say, apples in a crust cooked directly in the deep fryer, served fresh.) And honest to god I think I ate a McDonalds apple pie there just about every single day of our trip. To Paris. Fuck off, galettes des pommes, I'm eating this other, better thing right now.)
The apple orchard we went to was B. J. Reece Apple House, where we'd gone apple picking last year. B. J. Reece is located in Ellijay, GA, where all the other apple orchards are, and they have a reasonably large variety of apples that reach peak season throughout the fall. I think right now, pretty early in the season, we were picking Golden and Red Delicious, Red Romes, and Galas--though we didn't get to the Galas because they were across the road and our bags were full by the time we finished one side of the orchard.
B. J. Reece also has your standard panoply of of Farm FFamily FFFun activities, though they do nickel and dime you a la carte. $12 per peck sized back of apples, $5 per person for admission, $3 per person for the petting zoo, $2 per for the bouncing pillow. Because of this piecemeal ticketing process, the check-in process is a bit annoying (and not precisely cheap), but...I get it. They need to keep the lights on. I have no idea how these places ever really make money, frankly.
We only ended up doing the petting zoo, and the giant slide (which, thankfully, was included in the price of admission rather than a separate ticket). The petting zoo was quite nice. They had your standard animals (there are always goats), but they also had puppies and kittens (I KNOW) and a baby cow, who was not at all interested in being pet, but very cute, and will probably teach you Important Life Lessons à la City Slickers.
This chicken thinks he's FABULOUS.
Also, these asshole turkeys. Why do they always have turkeys at a petting zoo? WHO WANTS TO PET A TURKEY? LOOK AT THEM.
B. J. Reece also has a market and bakery that sells your usual stuff. Pre-picked apples, farm fresh vegetables, honey, jams and jellies, hot sauces, baked goods, boiled peanuts, popcorn, cider, that kind of thing. They also have a bit of a lunch operation, though I don't think they've fully ramped up for the season yet, as the only food they had on offer were hot dogs.
I included this because I've seen clover honey before, but...cotton honey? That's a thing? (I guess it must be. I'm no apiologist.)
One last plus of going to an apple orchard early-ish in the season is you can still try to get in your family picture for your holiday cards. These never turn out that great (because usually we take the photos ourselves, quite often using a selfie stick, which is what you do when you are too cheap and/of self-conscious to hire someone to take family photos for you), but aside from general too-sunny squintiness, I think we made out OK this year.
Now to defensively eat apples for the next three months.
I'm going to be out of town for four days next week (see: yesterday's post), so I signed up to be the "parent reader" for Nina's kindergarten class today. Because of guilt. Oh yeah, also I wanted to promote literacy and volunteer my time and surprise my kid at school. But mainly guilt.
I've done this "parent reader" gig a few times in the past, and I've learned a few things along the way. The first time I did it this, when Cal was in Pre-K, it took a lot more planning and schedule swapping (I was still working full time back then), so it was a higher pressure situation all around. I actually had to get some kind of special dispensation from the teacher to switch slots, since "parent readers" were supposed to come in only for the kids' SUPER DUPER ALL ABOUT ME SUPERSTAR week, and on Cal's original week I was work-scheduled up to the gills. (Cal went to a private school in midtown Atlanta at the time, and as a general rule I've noticed private schools are much less understanding about parents not being able to drop every damn thing and show up midday for stuff on short notice.) But anyway, that first time, the book I brought was...well, I thought it was a good idea. It was one of Cal's favorite books. It was by Dr. Seuss. We had a big hardcover with pictures that everyone could see, even all the way in the back. I loved this book as a kid myself. Right here:
MAJOR ERROR. First of all, the book is 64 pages long. Second of all, it has way too many words. Third, too much lingual dexterity is required, so you can only read it so fast.
Oh, brother.
I think by page four of the Happy Birthday book, the kids in the class were flopping around on the floor, running around the back of the room, and generally talking through the whole thing. (Even my own kid was losing interest, and this was HIS BOOK.) I think I skipped a whole chunk of pages in the middle, just to get through it (no one noticed), and at the end, one of the teachers came up to me and said (sympathetically, helpfully), "Yeah, I find that...shorter books are...usually better choices."
I'm not a naturally performative person. I will read to my own kids but I don't naturally have the type of personality that makes me want to read to all kids. I'm not even sure that I like most kids that aren't my own kids. But I can limp through this "parent reader" type of thing OK, because now I know to make better book choices. In sum:
* Keep it short.
* Keep it pithy.
* It doesn't matter if it's "too easy" for your kid. The other kids don't care how sophisticated your child's taste is, and the teacher isn't making judgements on your household or your kids' I.Q. if you end up choosing SPIDER-MAN'S POP-UP LASER TAG ADVENTURE for your parent reader selection, so long as the kids in the class stay out of her hair for ten minutes so she can check her e-mail and finish her sandwich.
* Pick books that are funny, where you can really act out the voices, are almost always successful if you're willing to go there.
* For God's sake, don't read The Giving Tree unless you want to cry in front of a bunch of five-year olds like some kind of psycho. In fact, I try to stay away from melancholia altogether, because I hate feelings. Where the Wild Things Are? Get outta here. The Runaway Bunny? Fuck you.
* Bring a selection, and let the kids choose, but know that there will be split votes and you'll have to end up reading pretty much all of them.
So here are the ones I brought.
Not pictured: Don't Push the Button (which is kind of a dumb book, but interactive--and yes, I know the book was not written for me, but it's still dumb) and The Monster at the End of This Book, which is actually the perfect book for this kind of thing, but it's only available in teeny tiny board book or Little Golden Book size, and also I can't find our copy. (Those groovy fonts, tho!)
We ended up having time to read three. Don't Push the Button as a warm-up act, This Is Not My Hat as the headliner (I like the art in that one, as well as in John Klassen's other book I Want My Hat Back--first in a three part hat oeuvre, I suppose), and closing with that old evergreen Don't Let The Pigeon Drive the Bus.
"How come you have so many funny books?" this one kid in the front row asked me at the end. Like it was some kind of accident. Kid, you don't even know.
(I know I said I'd update Chattanooga Day Two yesterday, but I LIED.)
Day Two in Chattanooga had a leisurely start. We had one destination in mind (about which more later), but this place did not open until noon, and we had some time to kill before then. So we decided to take a five minute-ish walk over to the Chattanooga Choo Choo for brunch.
The Chattanooga Choo Choo is a hotel built in an old decommissioned railway station, with guest rooms both inside the terminal building and in the Pullman train cars, the latter of which are on the old rails out back behind the lobby. Don't get me wrong, our Air BnB was nice, but if I had know that we could have slept on a train? Bitch, we would have been sleeping on a train. (I mean, probably. I did like having a king-sized bed at our townhouse, though. And laundry facilities. And, you know, a shower where I could move my arms around.) But even non-guests of the hotel were free to wander the grounds, and check out the lobby in the old terminal building, which had a Great Gatsby feel that I enjoyed very much. Even the bathrooms were neat, and reminded me of the bathrooms in my old elementary school (plus a chandelier, minus the off-color graffito-tagging).
We had breakfast at the Frothy Monkey, just off the main lobby, which inhabited a gorgeous, high-ceilinged space and featured a solid breakfast/brunch menu. The wait time for our food was a bit long, but it was Sunday brunch, nothing unexpected.
Out in the back courtyard of the hotel, by the train tracks, there were a slew of outdoor games. I wish we had known about them beforehand--I would have sent my kids to go play out there rather than waiting at our table FOREVER (in their estimation) for the food. But here's one of the purposes of me writing this recap: now you know. They had a few games of oversized Jenga, cornhole, and a bocce court, which my kids were obsessed with. Nina, in particular, was freakishly great at bocce. Meaning she beat pretty much everyone she played with, and I can assure you we were not pulling our punches. She's an old Italian man at core, I guess. I sure hope she gets that bocce scholarship when the time comes. (Other PRO TIP: they don't actually care who comes in to play with their stuff. We happened to have just eaten at the breakfast place, but you could also just wander in off the street and play a few rounds, no one was checking, and I think the trains and the station alone are area attractions.)
Our real destination that day, however, was Lake Winnie. Lake Winnie (née Winnepesaukah) is a local "family amusement park" (which I guess they make a point of noting, to distinguish it from all those porn and booze-soaked regular amusement parks) that I was attracted to because of, rather than in in spite of, its old-school bootleg charm. Less than 15 minutes from the Southside neighborhood where we were staying, it was technically located over the Tennessee-Georgia state line, but close enough to Chattanooga to be a local attraction (and a pretty great one at that, if you aren't too concerned about culture and learning and whatnot). It was a good time.
They had your standard state fair type amusement rides. Bumper cars, Tilt-a-Whirl, a bootleg Dumbo ride (conveniently called "Jumbo" so you REALLY WINK WINK NUDGE NUDGE GET IT), midway games, and an old wooden coaster called "The Cannonball" which was ominously closed for a good hour and a half hours after the park opening for inspection and maintenance. My two boys rode it anyway. They didn't die.
Oh right, also, there was this thing, which was featured, in all different color schemes and iterations, some with name tags ("Sneaky" was one) around the park. Seemed pretty creepy and like it would invite all sorts of bad behavior or Instagram photo opps, but IT'S OK, IT'S A FAMILY AMUSEMENT PARK* YOU GUYS.
But I think the real draw of Lake Winnie was the waterpark. The waterpark was, I believe, put in much later as an afterthought, but in my estimation it's way better than the regular amusement park in terms of bang for your buck. (Though: disclaimer, I personally dislike thrill rides, and several of my kids and for sure my spouse are prone to motion sickness. It doesn't mean they don't go on the rides anyway, but afterwards...regrets, we've had a few.) But back to the waterpark. A good number of waterslides, ranging from body slides to tube-ride spaghetti slides to a quad-pack of those super-steep wedgie-inducers; a lazy river, two water playground ares for the smaller kids, a some aquatic obstacles. The height cutoff was 42 inches for even the most demanding of rides, which meant that none of my kids were excluded from anything (thus eliminating the potential for needless jealousies and strife), and everything was neat and clean and no one caught herpangina. (Yet. I suppose I could be jumping the gun with our "HYGIENE COP IS PLEASED" all-clear signal. But it all looked very clean, and I didn't see any floating Band-Aids or errant turds anywhere in sight our whole time there. (Though I did see a lot of interesting tattoos.)
(Yes, we shelled out the big bucks for Dippin' Dots. No, I don't care if my kids go to college or not. Yes, I am Sean Spicer, and complained loudly while eating all of it.)
We stayed at Lake Winnie for about three and half hours. I think we could have stayed longer, but my kids were getting a bit tired, and I'm in a firm believer in the "too much of a good thing" principle. (In a word: don't.) So we headed back to the apartment, vegged out for about an hour and a half, and then headed back out for dinner.
Dinner was at Stir, one door over from the Frothy Monkey where we had brunch. It. Was. GOOD. I deliberately wanted to choose a place that didn't have too much of a "southern food" emphasis (personally I can't eat like that for more than a day and a half--really became a problem that time I went to the ASA in New Orleans and by the time I got home I never wanted to eat again) but Stir was more of an oyster bar slash elevated American fare with some Southern farm to table thrown in to round it out. I would have more pictures of what we ate, but it was gone by the time photography occurred to me. (Also, I know this is such a stupid dumb precious hipster thing, but I love it when a place has artisanal ice. It fascinates me--the dimensions, the clarity, the way it looks in the glass. I ordered an Old-Fashioned 80% for the ice cube. And then I ordered a second one because someone drank most of my first glass. And then my kids ate a third of my oysters so WHAT THE HELL DID I EVEN GET TO EAT THAT NIGHT?)
After dinner we walked back to our Air BnB and watched Wonder Woman, because Feminism. And that was our Chattanooga weekend. In sum: 36 hours was just about right. Did we do everything we were interested in doing? No. Do I want to move to Chattanooga? No. Will we be back to visit? Probably. It's close, it's easy, and my kids had a great weekend. Which means we had a great weekend too.
Regarding the song "Chattanooga Choo Choo," which I somehow know very well--I had a Glenn Miller's "This Is Jazz" Greatest Hits CD and listened to it when I was in college on a fairly regular basis. Because I am, and have always been, geriatric. "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and "Pennsylvania 6-5000" were among my favorite songs on that CD, so I guess we'll be going to Philly next chance we get. (The best part of the latter song is when they chant, "Pennsylvania Six-Five-Oh-Oh-Oh," and if you disagree with me on this point I will fight you.)
* Oh, one last thing. When we were leaving the water park through the main amusement park, I got chased down by one of the park attendants, who said he couldn't allow me to keep walking. I was wearing a one-piece bathing suit (full coverage, no parts showing--particularly because I have no parts to show) but he wouldn't let me proceed until I covered up. "That's fine," I told him pleasantly, "let me just get my clothes from my bag." (Joe was still walking and carrying the bag and about 30 feet ahead of me.) But the park attendant stood directly in my path blocking my way and literally wouldn't let me keep walking any further all bare naked as I was. So I had to call Joe on his cell phone (he didn't hear me yelling) and have him double back to bring me my shorts. It's not the park attendant's fault--he was just doing his job and doesn't make the rules--but yeah, wow, FAMILY PARK INDEED.
