People are picnicking and sitting on top of the pumpkins for family 'selfies'. There are so many people there that parking is a joke. Not worth the trouble or the price when the pumpkins don't even last a few weeks. Many of the pumpkins have soft spots which have rotted before Halloween arrives. The Big Macs are cracked, smashed or have holes in them and left to rot in the fields year after year. Regular size pumpkins are brought in from another vendor. We go to Bates every other year thinking it will be better each year. Really put a damper on the kids first camping trip! And to top it off, the porta potties were out of toilet paper by the morning, which didn't make for a good morning after a horrendous night. We watched 3 groups leave because of the sprinklers. We listened to kids crying because they were scared. Half of our group had to leave at 1:30 in the morning, as water had entered their tent and literally everything was wet. The employees at Bates allowed people to camp here, but failed to turn the sprinklers off. Shortly after that, we realized that it actually wasn't a storm. The noise and amount of water made it seem like we were in the middle of a horrible storm. we all thought it was a torrential downpour that woke us up. That was the first disappointment of the day. those bathrooms were locked, leaving only porta potties in the middle of the field. We made the decision to set up tents in the grass area in front of the store due to the proximity of the restrooms.

We were told that the bathrooms by the store would be open all night. We inquired where the bathrooms were, because we had 6 kids with us. When we arrived we were told where we could set up. We had reservations to attend the camping under the stars event on 8/21/21.

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