Pumpkin Pancakes and the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival

Two years ago we took Xander to the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin & Art Festival. We gave ourselves plenty of time, since the Festival attracts about 250,000 visitors, and were able to watch the parade, which was fabulous. The only draw back was that we took 92 into Half Moon Bay and it was a parking lot. Friends who left 30 minutes after us turned around, life is too short to spend your weekend in traffic.

This year we decided to try it again. However, we skipped 92 and opted to come by way of windy Woodside Road. The original plan was to go to the parade at 12 pm on Saturday, but Xander spiked a fever on Friday night, and Saturday was a sick day.

On Sunday we took advantage of having two preschool early birds, and left the house at 8:00 am. We headed to Woodside and had breakfast at Buck's. This is a new annual tradition. Buck's is a kitsch restaurant with tons of things for the kids to see from airplanes to cowboy hat lights, butterflies and model trains. The kid's menu even includes a scavenger hunt.  The special was pumpkin pancakes and bacon -- which was marvelous.

Taking Woodside Road into Half Moon Bay was definitely a good choice. We didn't hit any traffic. However Caleb gets car sick, and got car sick on this trip ... so maybe next year he'll wear a garbage bag on the trip to make for easier clean-up.

Once we arrived at the Festival, our perfect day came abruptly to an end. Turns out our family isn't art festival people. Between the crowds, and the booths showing lovely blown glass (Caleb was enamored, I wasn't in the mood to buy a shelf of broken glass) it was too much for us.

We did enjoy seeing the giant pumpkins, weighing more than a 1,000 pounds, and the cool pumpkin carving display... but you get all of this at the parade. So, next year, we are going on Saturday, eating breakfast at Buck's, preparing ourselves for a car sick preschooler, attending the parade, and skipping the art fair.