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Apples on a tree

Picking More Than Apples

Adventure

Twenty Pounds of Apples

We could have bought apples for $2/lb from the grocery store a mile from home.  We in fact do exactly that most weeks.  But once a year, we drive a half hour west, paying nearly twice as much per pound just for the opportunity to pick apples off the tree ourselves.  

Aisle between apple trees in an orchard

For the Weber family, sometime in September or October we’ll load the red wagon into the trunk, climb into the car and head to a Pick-Your-Own farm a half hour west of home.  We’ll take the camera and will probably capture some great shots of ourselves picking an apple.  We’ll remind the boys to only pick ripe, full size, apples that are still on the tree, haven’t started rotting, and haven’t been pecked at by birds.  Then in a few minutes, we’ll remind them again, and then quickly realize how full our bag has become.  

Hands holding three apples
Carrying bag of freshly picked apples

After picking apples, we’ll go back to the main barn area of the farm.  Hopefully they’re serving apple fritters - apples battered and deep fried - that day and we may buy a gallon of cider to help wash the fritters down.  The kids will try to feed the bored goats grass and then run through the hay bale maze.  After a little while someone will inevitably have a meltdown over a minor injustice and we’ll round up the troops to head back towards home.

Apple Fritters

It’s Not About the Apples

Big family trips to far away places are great and important in life.  But it’s the little trips that make a life well lived.  Looking back, do you remember the days you sat around the house, or the days you went out and did something?

Apple Pie

This annual adventure has nothing to do with the apples themselves, though it’s a good thing we like eating them because we come home with twenty pounds of apples.  We also come back with fun memories of doing something as a family.  The trip is a marker in the mental calendar of the season where summer has ended and winter will be coming sooner than later.  Having an annual adventure builds memories to last a lifetime.  This is exactly why it is important to not only get out on adventures regularly, but to have ones that happen annually that we can look back on with fond memories that are probably more a composite of the combined adventures and hopefully are rosier than they really were.