"It's like fishing...but it's up."

Pear picking in the San Bernardino mountains yesterday... featuring the most beautiful scenery I could have asked for on a warm fall day. The picking was not quite as kid-friendly as I had hoped - the pears were way too high up for any human to reach - but they gave you these cool picking tools that made the whole effort a little more of an adventure.

In fact, it was kind of like fishing, as Luke pointed out. (Luke took this crazy topsy-turvy picture of me.)

Then when we had finally picked as many as we could stuff into our little bags, we sat down and ate pears that were fresh off the tree, still warm from the sun. Altogether, we picked two big bags of pears and another bag of apples. Safe to say that Luke had a great time and was pretty much a happy kid all day.

We were lucky - and smart - to go on a Monday (I convinced Dave to take the day off and his boss said it was OK, ha ha). Given that this farm was just written up in both Sunset and Westways magazine, it has been a mob scene on weekends (cars sitting in line just to make it up the single lane highway up the mountain). So we were fortunate to have plenty of time and space to enjoy the scenery and the adventure.

Once we exhausted ourselves picking, we went to lunch at a local coffee shop that has a reputation for the best apple pie on the mountain. (I think the pie was good, but it was served warm under two massive scoops of ice cream so I couldn't really tell. Personal preference alert: I do not like pie or cake served a la mode. Hard to believe, but true. Please keep your ice cream far away from my pie.) The coffee shop was opened in 1953, and they had a little clipping hanging on the wall of a newspaper article from its opening week. I was amused to see that the article noted that "Mrs. Law will be cooking, and Miss Jane Smith will assist in serving." Can you imagine one of today's newspapers reporting on the opening of a restaurant and naming the servers?

One bummer about the trip was that Zach wasn't into and/or wasn't able to participate in the picking as much as I had thought he might. After our tractor ride up the mountain he and Dave went off in search of farm animals and stacks of hay. (He howled in protest during the entire tractor ride, but strangely enough, this morning at school he was eager to tell his teacher that he had gone on a tractor).

After lunch he wanted to go and ride on a little kiddie tractor, where you put the money in and in bounces up and down. First he rode it with kind of a skeptical look; then he asked me to put in more money so that he could get down on the ground and watch it from underneath as it bounced up and down. Our future engineer?