Growing up in New England, it seemed like a significant portion of October was spent carving pumpkins/throwing pumpkins out of moving vehicles at street signs, riding in haunted hayrides, and navigating corn mazes (of course, my eight-year-old self had a shitty memory). With the lack of foliage and farms located within 4 blocks of my house, I've never really found myself in the fall mood found pretty much everywhere in the eastern half of the country.
After talking about shit to do in the fall in SF, a friend suggested I steal a car and head down Arata's Pumpkin Farm in Half Moon Bay. While this place has been around since the Depression and likely known to everyone who has spent years in the Bay Area, it was new to me and a bunch of other transplant losers. So after a night of drinking crappy beer and lackluster pizza, we hauled ass down the coast to what has to be the closest to an authentic New England pumpkin farm I've seen. A petting zoo! Sword fights! A haunted barn! Pumpkins! A maze! Statues of King Kong! Feral cats! Goats! Overpriced produce! Adult-onset diabetes!
Admittedly the maze (not pictured because all my pictures just look like bales of hay) wasn't incredibly hard, half of the attractions were not open until October, and they didn't have kegs of Pabst or indoor bicycle parking, but it was still a quality trip out of the city.
The petting zoo was full of goats, a cow with a sore of the back of its head, a bunny, and a bunch of bird.
This cat is a real asshole.
I guess they sell pumpkins.
After leaving the pumpkin farm, we stopped off at Moss Beach to look at starfish and seals and shit. “Walking down to the beach, I briefly step on a wide and flat rock covered in sand. It was soft and had a bounce to it. It was a dead seal.” - @tpaz
