Corral de Calabazas

It must be said that Heather is pretty good at research.  In general, if she proposes something she's thoroughly looked into times, locations and necessary equipment.  Quite convenient really.  Especially in this instance as she found a cute little Pumpkin Patch for free in a vacant lot on the west side of town.  It was really small and wouldn't entertain big children for very long, but considering it was free, we felt comfortable enjoying ourselves and then leaving.  They had an amazing variety of pumpkins and gourds, which fortunately Joaquin found just as intriguing as I did because I spent a lot of time looking at them and wanted to buy some to bring home.  He thought that was a great idea and even helped me pick them out.  So I could say it was for my son!  They had a corn maze (really some metal fencing put in a maze with corn stalks woven through it) which Joaquin was very excited about.  We (meaning Aunty Boo-boo, Mommy and Uncle Matty) let him lead us around and he promptly brought us out again with very few wrong turns.  Joaquin really is very good at mazes, paper or apparently 3-D.  They also had these little troughs attached to old-fashioned water pumps were you could do rubber ducky races.  Joaquin LOVED this.  Seriously, after he beat Uncle Matty like a gazillion times I had a tough time pulling him away from it.  He developed a technique of a giant pump right at the beginning to jump start and then some frantic pumping to finish.  My favorite was watching him and Uncle Matty attempt to rope a steer dummy.  As Matthew would be the first to admit, despite his two turns as a stage cowboy, his roping skills are abysmal.  Joaquin's are likewise untrained but much more zealous.  They didn't hardly come close, but they did entertain mommy.  We then drove around on the little tractor trikes (or rather Joaquin did) and admired a variety of animals.  I liked the goats who were climbing around the top of the little structure made for them, but Joaquin was fascinated by the turkeys.  Admittedly turkeys are interesting and they had an older male with the full plummage, snood and wattle.  He was definitely something to see.  Their plummage isn't as colorful as a peacock, but it is totally gorgeous.  Finally we paid for our swan gourd and dragon toe squash (seriously!  that's the name) and went home.  Fun and it got me out of a long drive to the McCall pumpkin patch that is the normal October destination for Albuquerqueans.  Good job Boo-boo!