It’s the first day of Fall (side note, should ‘Fall’ be capitalized? I think you learn in grade school that the seasons don’t need capitals, but it just looks better to me!) and here in the great state of California, it is full sunshine! But the first day of Fall should be celebrated! We drove about 45 minutes east to beautiful Oak Glen, where we settled on Los Rios Farms to pick apples and have a picnic lunch. As always for this time of year, it was packed! We arrived at opening which makes a huge difference, and set off to fill a bag with fresh, organic apples straight from the trees.
We hiked up a bit of a hill to get to the orchards. Chloe takes after me and really doesn’t enjoy any kind of strenuous activity when it’s over 75 degrees so there was a lot of complaining! But we made it! Eric pushing the stroller with baby girl and me coaching my oldest every step of the way!
Once we reached the trees, Chloe Girl loved choosing apples and filling her bag (after we emptied it of rocks and random chunks of earth – I mean, they charge by the pound!) She also humored me and posed for a few photos with some of her truly best facial expressions (she’s three; I take what I can get) and only told us she was hungry eleven times (down from the average 27). We headed back to the lawn for lunch and Eric only stood in line for an hour for food (seriously, this place is CROWDED on the weekends).
Picking apples is not something either Eric or I did growing up, but it’s becoming a fun tradition for our little family. Granted, I always have visions of spending an hour in the orchards filling bags and bags with apples, but then reality reminds me that each bag runs us about $15 and what in the world would I do with that many apples anyway? But watching my toddler fill her bag is worth the entire trip. She looks for good ones, and out of the hundreds dangling from the trees, she knows which EXACT apple is the right one in the moment. She’s a genius, I tell you. Oh, and she doesn’t even like to eat apples. Sad, I know, but she’ll eat apple juice, apple sauce and sometimes apple pie. Which brings me to perhaps the best part of this trip? Coming home and making a pie. This year, I branched out and tried my hand at apple turnovers! They came out delicious, and I’ll be adding the recipe in a seperate post.
How do you and your family celebrate Fall? And do you go apple picking?
xoxo,
Heidi
Very cute! My mom used to take us to Oak Glen. My favorite parts were buying gems (polished rocks) and walking through the tiny museum or whatever it was (themed rooms full of taxidermied animals). But picking apples sounds nice too 😉