Pumpkin School Day 2 &3

It has been such a whirlwind weekend at pumpkin school I just haven't had the time to do proper posting of the events. Saturday was a full day in the classroom followed by a dinner that was excellent, including beer and wine. The reason for missing the post yesterday was an extra early start to the final day which was conducted at the pumpkin lot in Simi Valley and included a total walk-through of all the features and functions of the lots. There is a definite overload of information for us to digest in a short time.

The Saturday class also included a presentation to the couple who is here for their 20th year:

The two gentleman on the right are the two owners of the company. It's hard to imagine doing this for twenty years.

The most interesting part of the class was the time spent at the Simi Valley lot on Sunday morning learning about all of the features and responsibilities at the lot. These photos provide a good idea of all the activities.

Also, these photos show the overwhelming materials that are required to perform our jobs. You can see the stacks of cartons and totes that all of us had to load in our vehicles to take with us to our individual locations.

We had to load all of ours into the truck bed and transfer them to the RV when we drove back to Rancho Cucamonga following class to retrieve our RV.

These are some shots of the rides and areas that we are responsible to cover each day with the employees that we hire before the lot opens on October 1:

Starting with the bungee jump (our lot will not have one of these). The instruction was given by Rob Lambert, one of the owners and the children are grandchildren of one of the office workers:

There are a couple of rides for the kids:

and some blow-ups of obstacle courses and slides:

Also, each lot has a petting zoo:

Our class ended by 11 AM yesterday and we had to pick up our RV and drive to the Orange County Fairgrounds to setup our RV - temporarily - in a space until we begin lot setup this coming weekend. We had a horrible experience with this move as the Fairgrounds had different dates for our arrival. After we finally got everything sorted out, we got settled in a temporary location at around 8 PM.

So, we are really tired and are tempted to pitch this whole adventure and head home. The rewards are fantastic though, and we are going to stick it out as long as we can. We are told that the startup is by far the toughest part and things will get better - not easier - as time goes on. We hope they are right...