Tucson and Willcox (Fall Break: Days 13 and 14)

We drove down to Tucson for the long holiday weekend after the fall and Halloween pictures on Friday.  On Saturday morning Michael, my mom and I went to see The Martian.  It was excellent.  I recommend it, highly.

 On Saturday afternoon I went to Walmart, specifically to look for a new U of A shirt.  The Walmart at El Con always has lots of U of A gear so that's where I headed.  I found lots of stuff, including THIS:

Do you see?  Do you see it?  HOW COULD THEY?  Tuscon?  Tuscon?????  That is NOT how it's spelled.  And why in god's name does the v-neck cut off the circle around the print?

So anyway.  I took those pictures and posted them to a Tucson group I belong to on facebook.  It blew up with comments.  The last time I got a notification it was at 109 comments.  People are not happy.  Way to go people of Tucson!

This is what I ended up buying.  At least Arizona is spelled correctly.

Michael also happened to be wearing a U of A shirt so it called for a picture.

On Sunday we got up and, with my parents, drove a little more than an hour south of Tucson to Willcox.

First on the agenda: apple picking.

We had to go pretty far back into the orchard to find trees that weren't completely stripped, but once we found them we were in apple heaven.  It was both Spencer and Elliott's first time to pick apples.

The high was supposed to be 84 that day, but that was a lie.  It topped out in the 90's and we were roasting.

I forced Michael's participation in an action shot.

We picked four buckets full.  It might have been about three buckets too many.

After apple picking we ate some lunch and then headed for the pumpkin patch.  They are owned by the same farm but they are close to 10 miles apart.

I got these pictures of the kids in one shot each.  It's like a pumpkin miracle.

On the short list for favorite picture of all time.

The family picture took quite a few more attempts.

The kids played on the tractors while the men folk bought tickets for the hay ride and corn maze.

Hay ride.  See, my parents really were there.

We took the hay ride out to the pumpkin patch.  What you see here is just a teeny tiny sliver of the whole pumpkin patch.  It was huge.

We let the kids pick a small pumpkin for each of them.  We probably won't end up carving these.

Our last stop of the day was the corn maze.  It was awful.  15 acres of corn, 6 miles of pathway, no drinking water, hot temperatures, high sun and we got totally and completely lost.

This might have been part of the problem.  We did the "challenge" maze knowing it could take between 60 and 90 minutes to finish.

The kids were hot and thirsty, but they really did love the entire thing.  They thought it was so fun to call out which way we should turn and to talk about being lost.  I did not share their enthusiasm.

This is how we felt 30 minutes into it.

After 45 minutes we climbed up this observation walkway to get an idea of where we were.  The exit was over by those trees.  DAMMIT!

We were hoping and praying for an air evacuation when this drone flew over to us.

We thought it might drop a message or water or something but it just recorded us for a minute and then flew away.  Thanks for nothing drone. 

We finally made it out of the maze 60 minutes later.  We exited via the entrance, so we really didn't finish it per the rules, but nobody cared.  We were just happy to get some fluids into our bodies and to get into the air conditioned cars.