Perfect Autumn Day

For our community event this past week, my housemates and I decided to spend the day in Hood River and head out to the apple orchards on Sunday. I've heard a lot about Hood River - Ian's best friend Joel is from there - so I was excited to finally see the place. We got into town after a lazy sunday morning around 1:30 and met up with Joel for some coffee and catching up. We swapped stories from our community with those of his girlfriend Christine's experience with JVC in New Jersey, and got the quick tour Hood River - it's not that big. It was nice to spend time with a familiar face. We left Joel to spend the rest of his birthday (I forgot it was his b-day, woops) with friends and continued on our adventure. We hopped on a windy road up into the mountains that led us through scenic viewpoints of Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams and found our way to Rasmussen Farms. This place was AWESOME! Though not as big as Green Bluff back in Spokane, it definatly made me sad I hadn't gone more often when I had the chance. Rasmussen farms had a pumpkin patch, hot cider, a corn maze, and barrels of apples and squash for the taking. By the time we got there, it was late afternoon, the sun was low and golden, the air crisp and fresh, it was the perfect fall day. We wandered through the corn maze, picked out some delicious looking pears, apples, and squash to take home, and then got to pick out our pumpkins! Because we used community money for the pumpkins (we're going to roast the seeds and make pie/soup from the flesh), we tried to keep them pretty small, but it was hard to find the right one. I probably took the longest to finally decide, but we were all happy with our choices. Now we just have till the week before Halloween to carve into those suckers. We finished the day off with a nice Full Sail beer at the brewery back in the Hood.