The good thing about being a technology hoarder is that when your laptop breaks your husband can find an old one he reformatted to run some crazy obscure operating system and fix it up with nice normal stuff like Windows and Picasa so you don’t go into laptop withdrawal  It also means you can post pictures of your family trip to the Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular in a semi-timely manner. Hooray for my awesome husband!

The Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular was pretty spectacular. I’d heard it can be insanely crowded on most nights, so we planned as well as we could for a non-busy time: the last night it was on, after Halloween, we had advanced tickets and we got there before they opened. It worked, really well actually. We were the third people in line at the start of the trail and the hardest part was entertaining two toddlers who are used to being allowed to run wild at the zoo. Caroline was being particularly…toddler-like, so keeping track of her once they opened the trail was hard, especially because she refused to ride in the luxury of her stroller. I’m really glad we went and that we got to see it – but I don’t think we’ll be going back until the kids are old enough to appreciate the pumpkins.

Those are all real pumpkins, really carved by hand, and each lit individually by LEDs. They do a theme each year, and this one was something about great films or stars of stage and screen or…whatever. The best part was that they piped John Williams movie theme music through the whole thing. At the end there’s a giant tree FULL of pumpkins called The Laughing Tree. Even though it was the last night of the display there was a guy carving a pumpkin larger than both of my children combined. And the best part we got to see it all, go home, and be in bed at a nice decent hour.

Tags: Caroline, E, evan, family, fun, Halloween, roger williams park zoo, zoo