Liepold Farms Fall Festival

This is the most horrendously disorganized and frustrating pumpkin patch I've ever seen in my life. Be prepared to use your psychic powers to figure everything out if you're going there for the first time, because there is NO ONE to be found to ask for help. None of the employees or volunteers or whatever they are were dressed in any way to discern them from a tourist.



First, parking: We drive into the lot, and the people who are supposed to be guiding us are standing there chatting or staring at us. So eventually we are guided to the front and find some empty spots, and oh! THAT got their attention, because these EMPTY UNMARKED spots are "handicapped" spots. "That's why they're empty," the woman says. Ohhh-kayyyy...... Then she points in a general direction where we're supposed to go, and another woman "guiding" (who was ignoring us and chatting before) makes us stop and wait for the cars behind us to go ahead.



So, not a great start.



There are no signs anywhere to point to what anything is, but there are lines everywhere. After deciding to do a few activities, we thought we could stand in line and hand them cash for it, but no, it turns out you have to wait in line in front of a big tent to buy tickets to any activity you want to do. Which would have been fine if that had been CLEAR FROM THE START instead of standing there like an idiot, waiting.



The only sign I eventually saw was a tiny, handwritten sign in cursive ON THE GROUND WHERE PEOPLE ARE STANDING AND BLOCKING IT that said, "Hay Line Ride" on one side only, so if you walked by the other direction and weren't scanning the ground intently (and why would you, unless you're a 2-year old, but then most 2-year olds don't know how to read), you'd miss it entirely.



They don't accept cards, cash only, but it doesn't say that on their website, or anywhere on the grounds, which means after standing in line (again) for food, you can't pay unless you stand in line for the ATM....it was just ridiculous. Seriously.



And the lines are all over the place - there's no rhyme or reason to any of it. What pissed me off the most and was (literally and figuratively) the last straw for me was standing in line for over half hour for the Hay Ride, and then when the tractors pulled up, everyone rushed to get on...but there was no organization. Nobody was at the front of the line to guide you, nobody pointed to where you should probably sit, nobody said how you should "load" yourselves; we stood there for a few seconds trying to figure out where we should go (we had 2 adults, a senior citizen, and a toddler with us) while everyone behind us was rushing around us. I mean, at that point, ANYONE passing by could have just jumped on the wagons because there was no organization whatsoever. I was wondering why I had bothered standing in line for so long if I could have just casually strolled by right after the wagons pulled up and jumped right on. And I was NOT about to stand in line for ANOTHER half-hour.



And the pumpkin "patch" is just that - a tiny square where they have store-bought pumpkins lying on the ground. I was so angry at that point we didn't bother to buy one, we just left. I'll get my pumpkin elsewhere, and am never visiting this poorly run "farm" again. I hope they're better farmers than activity organizers, so help them.

My daughter Ella loved the maze and HUGE pumpkins! We had lots of fun and will come back for many years.