Josh and I had a whole basic fall weekend last year, but since Josh didn’t have this long weekend off, we still decided to go apple picking and get fun fall drinks. We planned on going to Echo Hill, where we went last year, but we checked their website Sunday morning, and they unfortunately were out of apples for the year. They also have pumpkins and pick-your-own sunflowers, but we really wanted apples.

So we quickly came up with a compromise. There’s an orchard in town where I’ve gone before with my parents to pick apples and blueberries, and they still had apples available for PYO. And, of course, we still wanted to get fun drinks after, so we decided to a restaurant in town where we’ve been before on date night and I know always has a seasonal cocktail menu.

They suggested bringing your own bag, so I made sure to grab one of my reusable grocery bags before leaving. We didn’t plan on getting too many, just enough to split between the two of us. We had to go pretty far back in the rows to find decent size apples; it looks like it’s close to the end of the crop for the season. Thankfully, Josh is tall and was able to reach a lot of the ones at the top of the trees, while I scoped out the lower branches.

I think we picked either Cortland or Liberty apples; we were really just looking for any that weren’t damaged or had holes in them. We ended up with about 18 apples, so we split them later on.

Back up front, they had pumpkins available for purchase, and I tried to find the smallest one since it was 99 cents per pound. I have no use for a big pumpkin, but the little ones were cute. I think we ended up with about five pounds of apples (I always forget how much a pound of apples is) and I bought my little pumpkin. I wiped it off when we got back, and the pumpkin’s new home is on my TV stand.

We had our drinks and watched football up on the TVs over the bar. The drinks weren’t quite as fun as the ones we had last year, but still seasonal enough and we got to watch football. We stayed for just the one round and then came back to my condo to make dinner—we made our own pizza—and to keep watching football.

Our next fun fall thing planned is this Friday: a beer tasting in a corn maze. It’s the same maze we went to last year, but this time around there are different breweries set up throughout the maze to get to go and find. I’m super excited!