One more pumpkin festival please!

I wanted to do one more Halloween activity with the girls since I will be out of town this weekend. We went to the Pumpkin Playground at Burke Nursery. It had rained all night so the ground was muddy, but it must have deterred people from going because there were literally 5 other people there. It was awesome. We had the run of the place. We even got our own hayride through the spooky forest.

The girls wore their costumes. Amelia wanted to be the same thing as last year, and Elsa wore one of Amelia's old costumes.








Elsa discovered that her monkey costume made a nice pillow.



























My personal favorite activity:





Muddy monkey feet.




The girls loved checking out all the creepy creatures in the haunted forest.







I'm sad to be missing out on the Halloween festivities, but not sad that I'll be spending the weekend in Vancouver with my mom and sisters!

The scenic drive.

Sunday afternoon we decided to drive to Shenandoah National Park and do the Skyline Drive since the leaves are right at their peak. Of course, so did thousands of other people. It took much longer than usual to get there and when we finally got close to the park entrance, we had to inch along in a long line of cars for about an hour. Just as we were about to reach the entrance, smoke started coming out of our hood. Never a good sign. So we pulled over to assess the situation.



It turns out that something was leaking all over, gushing actually. This seemed like a very bad sign. Especially considering the fact that we were in a small town in nowhere Virginia and it was a Sunday afternoon. We didn't know what was leaking or how to fix it. Amelia said the sweetest prayer asking for help with our car and for dad to be able to find someone to help us. Ben headed down the main street of town to try and find a car repair place that was open. He passed several that were closed and ended up at an Autozone. They gave Ben the number of a place that was open, Wayne's World Automotive. Ben called them up and two mechanics immediately came and picked him up and drove him back to our car. They were super nice, real Southern Virginia types. In the short drive Ben experienced with them in their truck, the topics of guns and "the law" came up, as well as a lot of cursing at the traffic due to all these crazy people that had come all this way just to look at a leaf. He also passed another truck that had a huge American flag on one side, and an equally large Confederate flag on the other side. They checked out the car and it turns out that a hose had disconnected from the radiator and we were leaking antifreeze everywhere. They reattached it and then walked over to a friend's house who lived nearby and got some antifreeze. We were preparing ourselves for the worst, so a one hour delay and $20 was wonderful.


We had this lovely view of traffic while waiting for Ben to find help.


Elsa sat in her car seat without making a peep for the entire hour or more that we were pulled over. It was incredible. This was after already driving in the car for 2 1/2 hours.


We finally made it into the park!












We had time for a quick walk through the woods.

All the traffic was worth it to experience these views:








Elsa continued to be content and preferred looking at the leaves through this bowl.






A few of our fellow leaf-admirers.


The sunset was making everything extra red. It looked like the hills were on fire. Incredible!