Kitsch, in the Great Outdoors

This weekend, Frank and I drove up to Riley's Farm in Oak Glen, California. It's about 10 miles and light years north of Beaumont, a town grown grey and weary along the I-10 freeway to more glamorous places down the road, such as Morango Casino and Palm Springs. Riley's is set on a lovely hillside at least a thousand feet higher than Beaumont. Riley's has hundreds of acres of fruit trees, mostly apple, many of them 'heritage' strains.

They also have a general store (where they sell you baskets to pick fruit), a BBQ barn (where they sell you lunch), a cider-pressing shed, and some corny-sort-of-historical-looking wooden buildings. They also host Civil War reenactments. (Go figure!)

We stopped first at the general store and were stunned to pay $8.50 to pick a quart of raspberries. Okay, that's probably $2.00 per half pint, which is maybe 50 cents cheaper than in the store, but it seemed like a lot at the time. I chalked it up to 'having an experience.' We toddled out into the berry patch (and the rain and the cold) with a couple of quart baskets and high hopes.

From the looks of the spoiled fruit on the vines, we should've arrived 10 days earlier -- we'd have needed only ten minutes in the berry patch to pick a quart. As it happened, it took us well over an hour to gather one quart and we returned to the BBQ barn cold, wet, and numb! After some hot cider and pumpkin bread (which they'll also sell you), we trekked down the muddy road to pick apples. The guy who took our ticket (for that $15, 1/2 peck basket!) looked like Hagrid from the Harry Potter movies, only not 10 feet tall. (Actually, he was kind of cute in a hairy pirate kind of way.) He had all sorts of things to tell us about the apples, but we were cold again and we made short work of the picking (and hand eating) of apples.

All in all, we had a good time. It was kind of laughable but it did feel good to get out in to brisk air and be surrounded by the orchards and the forests up there. Next summer we'd like to go back with friends -- probably friends with a certain jadedness about them but not completely derisive. If you're interested, let us know!