This last week I was feeling under the weather, so we had to slow down our normal adventures. However, we did take this opportunity to celebrate fall with pumpkins, pumpkins, and more pumpkins.
On Monday we went to our Stake FHE activity where we helped carve pumpkins for the Pumpkin Walk. The Pumpkin Walk has been a tradition here in Cache Valley since 1983! This event has between 2,000 and 3,000 pumpkins each year - all donated by members of the community. Our stake volunteered our time to help carve 500 of these pumpkins. Well, neither of us are artists, so we are sure the 10 pumpkins we carved will be hidden in the back or maybe will be donated to a new game of pumpkin smashing.
The bonus of volunteering our time to help with the pumpkins is all of the pumpkin seeds we were able to take home. We spent hours on hours cooking around 20 cups of pumpkin seeds! The six flavors we tried were Seasoned Salt, Sea Salt, Garlic, Chipotle, Cinnamon and Sugar, and Honey Roasted. After some great taste testing we settled on Seasoned Salt and Sea Salt as our favorites and made the bulk of our seeds with these flavors. Now we have plenty of seeds for snacking on!
Continuing on with our pumpkins we also met up with our friends Andrew and Jessica to have a pumpkin carving date. Both couples carved a pumpkin, and the themes we chose for the pumpkins just show that we were made to be friends. They went with trees and a river and Chris and I tried using some of the technic we saw others using on Monday to shade some snow-capped mountains. After carving the pumpkins we made some snacks and watched "Where the Wild Things Are". Any guesses on what we ate for snacks? Pumpkin cookies and more pumpkin seeds made that night.
Forgetting the pumpkins for a while we also went to the Gossner Cheese Factory. Being from Wisconsin, I felt kinda guilty visiting a cheese factory in Utah but couldn't deny that they made some great things. Can we just all agree that everyplace should have as many free samples as Gossners? The highlight was probably all of the flavored milk! While Chris was sticking with his favorites of Rootbeer Milk and Cookies & Cream Milk, I was a sucker for the Strawberry Milk and Mango Milk. Of course we bought some milk for later (after all, we need something to drink with all our salted pumpkin seeds).
Since I was feeling a bit better that day, we were able to venture outside and explore Dry Canyon after our stop at Gossners. While there were quite a few dead leaves we also saw some amazing red and orange colors. There was some really neat rocks in the canyon so we scrambled around and watched an amazing sunset. There really is nothing like fall in the mountains.
Well those are the highlights of our week! Also embedded in there we did get some Pumpkin Smash Jamba Juice and made some homemade pumpkin bread, but we're sure you're already pumpkined out so we will push those nights aside....But have we told you yet that we love pumpkins?
Remember to pray and remember to play,
Mr. & (not quite)Mrs. Andrew
PS. WE LIKE TO HAMMOCK!!! WE LIKE, WE LIKE TO HAMMOCK!!!
