Antique trucks with oversized strawberries are just the footnotes to the bigger attractions. |
Many parents find it important, as each season rolls around, to find an assortment of festivities to enjoy with their family. This may be a visit to the mall Santa, hunting eggs at the neighborhood church or watching the fireworks go off like a mama who just found the mess I made in collaboration with my roommates. For Halloween, however, it can be the most fun of all.
Of all the holidays, we've done more Halloween stuff than probably all the rest combined. It's not that we're big punkin-heads, though I imagine we are, but that our city is so predisposed to autumn that it comes as second nature, and let's face it, Halloween can be an awful lot of fun if you do it right.
When it came time for us to do it right, we skipped all the sideshows and went straight for Seattle's first, biggest and best Halloween farm. That's right, Remlinger Farms in the city of Carnation is not only the first and biggest of its type, but it actually grows Halloween. I say this with authority because I've been there and I've seen the fields in person.
The Remlinger Farms Halloween festival is open every day from now through Halloween, and is the best deal in entertainment of any attraction we've attended. It's $13 to get in, and that goes for kids and grownups alike, but that's not all! Once you're in the door it covers just about everything. Not like many events where you pay for parking, admission, and then all of your entertainment. One charge does it all.
So once you park for free and go inside, the farm is your oyster, though now that I think about it, oysters are one thing I don't think they have. They've got everything else though, and I don't even have enough room to cover it all, so I'll do my best with the space allowed. After all, that's what they do, give you the most they can possibly fit in the space they've got, which happens to be a 200-acre farm so they've got more space and 32-years experience making it fit.
One fun attraction they have, and it's just for fun, like all of it, is tons of painted cutouts for people to pop their heads through and have their pictures taken. Below you can see my entire staff taking turns as a kitty-cat, but there's probably fifty different ones all around the farm. And that, quite literally, is just the beginning.
Above - Of all the attractions, the lesser, on-the-way ones were just as great as the greatest of all of them. With the dozens of painted cutouts like these, it's always easy to find something fun and photoworthy with never a need to wait in line. In this case, we got to be cuddly little kitty cats. Meow!
Then there's a real 20-foot long, 4-ton steam train that you can ride around on! It goes to the far side of the park, takes you around to see all the rides and games, and gives you another view of the hundreds of scarecrows they have standing around. I don't know what kind of problem they had in the past with crows, but I'll tell you they can't possibly have any problems now because they've got kid scarecrows, scary scarecrows and a good assortment of politician scarecrows, which may be the scariest of all. The train goes by llamas, Alpacas, miniature donkeys and horses and even some emus before taking a loop and heading back by way of a train tunnel. And of course, like everything else, this is included free with admission!
The next thing you can't miss is all the amusement park rides (photo at the bottom of this article). When we've wanted to go on rides before we faced a couple killer obstacles, the first being the prohibitive cost, the second being all those pesky height restrictions. While height restrictions are important, fun is important too, so Remlinger Farms goes the extra half-mile to offer a bunch of rides that are sufficiently tame to allow us shorter folks a fair shake. They've got a roller coaster, a tea cups-style ride, a spider kind of ride, a mini Ferris Wheel and carousel just to name a few. All toned down enough to let us climb aboard, and, as with everything else, it is all included in your admission price.
They've even got a Not-So-Scary Haunted House with a Peter Pan theme. It's not the biggest one you've ever seen, but it's the biggest one I've ever seen, because I've never seen one before. It was fun and perfectly scary to me. If you want to go through it but think your kids might not handle it too well, take a quick run-through yourself. It's not so bad but precaution is never a bad thing.
There's also a couple different live shows that go on throughout the day. The biggest one is the Eric Ode show. Award-winning Singer/Songwriter Eric Ode was a teacher for 14-years and now spends his days hanging out with his guitar and banjoed puppet friends Zeb and Scratch singing songs for kids and parents who need to rest their tired feet. Shows run throughout the day, and when he isn't there or taking a snack break, he hangs out by Hank the steam choo-choo's line singing songs and entertaining the waiters-for and passersby alike. That's a dedication to a quality experience right there, and especially so when you know how fun he is and how much he loves what he does.
Above - Live on the main stage is fan and family favorite Eric Ode, with songs ranging from silly to fun to more silly still. And it's not just him, either, he's got all kinds of kids and puppets that help him bring the fun.
Left - Although he's very, very old (twelve-years-old), John Thompson rocks the house, except that his rock is soft enough to appeal to a wide audience, and "the house" is actually mostly outdoors.
The other top-notch singy-songsmith is 12-year-old John Thompson who stands alone with his guitar to the musical delight of envious kids and fawning mothers alike. He sings old standards as well as favorites of his own. Let it be known, we're not just endorsing him because we love to see kids taking the lead in the entertainment field, but because he's got the skills to pay the bills, even though his show is as free as the rest of the best inside the Remlinger Farms campus.
There is so much other stuff to see too, and I've covered a lot of it individually by attraction in other articles, such as the special about the pony rides, the hay maze and pumpkin patch. I know I'm barely scratching the surface, but it's an itch that needs scratching and doing so feels oh so satisfying.
The only thing that isn't covered in your admission is the food, and believe my watering mouth when I tell you there's a taste for every tongue. There's as many food choices as you could want from an outdoor festival, like pizza, burgers, fish n' chips, popcorn and even the official sit-down-style restaurant, where we partook of chicken nuggets, hotdogs and fries, not to mention cookies. And I mean it seriously, let's not mention the cookies. They were delicious, but we wanted to make a meal out of them, which is apparently uncool by the parental types, even on special occasions like this.
And if you like the farm freshness of the fresh farmness, check out their expansive farmers market where you can get fresh fruits and vegetables, premium jams and unique jellies, and a unique variety of farm-themed gift ideas from local artisans and the nation's best providers alike.
Above - Although it isn't the best quality picture (thanks to the impending death of our Nikon, this shot gives you a pretty good idea of the overwhelming options that await you in the fully-stocked farmers market.
There is much too much at the farm for me to explain, especially since I'm already way over my word limit, but you can read all about it including hours of operation, directions and special attractions and offers I may have overlooked, at their website. So stop wasting your precious reading minutes here and go learn the rest of the story at www.RemlingerFarms.com. I'll wager you'll be glad you did.
Before your eyes get as droopy as ours eventually did, be sure to stop in at the 4H Barn and listen to the sheep baa and the donkeys bray, feel the soft rabbits, gabble with the geese and coo with the doves. And while there don't forget to oink with the pigs, cluck with the chickens and quack with the ducks! Tell them Dominic and Brendan sent you!
All in all (and I do mean "all") there's no better place for the full range of Halloween fun and no better value than Remlinger Farms... the race isn't even close. If I had to find a complaint, it would normally be that it eventually had to end, but I can't even say that. By the time we left, which was almost 6-hours after we arrived, we'd seen it all, done the majority, had a good lunch, and were so tuckered-out we couldn't have stuck around to partake of the rest if we'd wanted to, which I guess we did. It's just that our eyelids eventually grew heavy and this place was the best, most out-tiring fun we'd had in as long as I can recall, and my ability to recall such things has only gotten better as I've gotten older.
Above - Whether you're interested in riding a minature roller coaster or taking a giganti-punkin spin, there's an amusement park ride that's just your speed, and all of them are fun and delightfully included in the price of admission. That means that if you don't take part in the rides, it's because you don't want to, and that's okay too. Believe me, there's plenty of stuff to do otherwise, if you're so disinclined.
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