Halloween is Monday friends. Do you have your pumpkins yet? Your mums? Your gourds? Your apple butter? Your hayride? Sounds like you have not been to Huber’s yet.
We go every fall, the whole fam-damly. It started when my oldest daughter was about a year old, and we have been every year since. We eat first (my favorite part), then off to pick your own pumpkins, play in the “barnyard”, shop for cheap beautiful pumpkins/gourds and roll back home. This year, it was 75 degrees, and we stayed for five hours. So did most the population of Southern Indiana and Jefferson County. We saw four families from our school there.
Lucie’s first adventure to Huber’s. Shown here with my mother, Nancy Harmon aka “The Nance.”
Potters road tripping to Huber’s.
Did I mention that I love to go there on off season too? Well, that’s a post for another time.
But this post is to tell you that you still have time and even though it is hard to navigate to Indiana right now, it is worth the drive.
We went for “dinner”, which is lunch for most. We had a reservation for 1:30pm on Sunday. This is what we walked into at 1:30pm.
Yep we all had a reservation.
We tried to get to the front of this line to say we had a reservation. Jokes on us, because all these people do too. However, in classic Huber’s German perfunctory fashion, our wait time was about 7 minutes.
Game on in Barn 1.
When the dining room is this big, they are turning tables very quickly. We promptly start attacking the buffet. My kids have been dreaming about this meal since breakfast.
Here’s the menu–it never changes and that’s what makes it so good.
- Joe’s Fried Biscuits with Apple Butter,
- choice of Waldorf Salad or Country Slaw
- Fried Chicken
- Huber Honey Ham
- Real Mashed Potatoes with Milk Gravy
- Corn
- Green Beans
- Homemade Chicken and Dumplings
Lucie’s perfect plate. This was round 1.
Molly’s perfect plate. Round 2 was an entire plate of just chicken and dumplings.
Big Mike loves it, even though it’s not pickles and olives.
So has Grandpa Potter. Here is his plate. He put those rolls in his pocket to make room for the food when he walked back from the buffet. I kid you not. He’s a genius.
This child at the table behind us was done before dinner.
And…we’re done.
But let’s talk about the kicker: three kinds of cobbler (cherry, apple and blackberry) with individually wrapped Blue Bell vanilla ice cream servings. Heaven.
Patrick Potter, straight shot to the sugar.
A tisket a tasket, a basket of Blue Bell.
Roll out of that dining room. Time for me to shop and kids to play in the Barnyard. Mommy doesn’t do petting zoo. EVER.
People lined up to play all the games in the Barnyard.
Hayride anyone?
I went shopping for my pumpkins and other unique gourds I never seem to find anywhere else.
Baby pumpkins
Indian Corn, pronounced Indian “Carn” here.
Gourds
Ugly Pumpkins (at least that is what we call them)
Black, white, gray and orange.
I call these “double pumpkins.” Molly prefers to call them “booty pumpkins.”
Shopping and playing over. Time to catch the hayride wagon to the pumpkin patch. This is where the Potters all get a liiitttllle competitive.
This is where pumpkins come from.
Looks innocent. They are really sitting on their pumpkins so that nobody else can pick them.
A feeble attempt to lift this 20 pound pumpkin. He did it!
We bought seven huge pumpkins for nothing. We paid in sweat equity when trying to carry these all the way back to the car. Who needs bootcamp, just try to lug these around for five minutes.
And for our last treat, we did the family golf cart trail rides. These are new this year, and it was our favorite part. You take a trail ride on a golf cart for about twenty minutes. We wondered why there were seat belts in the golf cart and figured out real quick that this was a like a dune buggy ride. How my son stayed in the golf cart is an act of God.
She’s in for a wild ride.
Here’s where it gets tricky. The easiest, fastest way to get to Huber’s for most of us was across the Sherman Minton Bridge. Since that is out of commission, getting to Huber’s is a little bit more of a drive. I’m no Magellan, so I’m not even going to try to tell you how to get there now. I was riding in the third row of a car when I went a few weeks ago and too busy trying not to vomit to pay attention to how we got there. It took a good 45 minutes to get there from Eastern Jefferson County. This trip is worth 45 minutes.
So after five hours, seven big buffet dinners for the family, three kinds of cobbler, seven big orange pumpkins, two white pumpkins, one gray pumpkin, one ugly pumpkin, four huge mum plants, two rides on the golf cart buggies, endless games, and one temper tantrum in the punkin’ patch, we can call Huber’s Family Adventure 2011 a wrap. Time to head back across the bridge (the one working bridge) and head home.
Follow the signs and the “carn” stalk home.
Joe Huber’s Family Farm is located at 2421 Engle Road, Starlight, Indiana. Their phone number is 812-923-5255.
