Projectile pumpkins?

OTHELLO — There will be giant bubbles, hayrides and a miniature train Friday and Saturday, as Country Cousins kicks off the season with its Fall Festival. 

Oh, and projectile pumpkins. 

“It is so cool,” said Amy Freeman Phillips, one of the owners of Country Cousins. “Every hour on the hour my dad shoots a pumpkin out of the cannon. That pumpkin goes over a quarter of a mile.” 

Country Cousins pulls out all the stops for autumn. From this weekend until Oct. 31, families can come out and experience two corn mazes plus a smaller hay maze, a huge hay mountain, a jumping pillow, a petting zoo, a zip line and a couple of mega-slides along with a host of other family fun activities Phillips said. There’s also a corn pit, which is kind of like the ball pit at a fast-food playground but much bigger and, as the name would suggest, filled with real corn. 

“I love the corn pit because it’s almost therapeutic on my feet,” Phillips said. “We get very few adults in there, but I love it.” 

The giant bubbles are new this year, Phillips said. They’re made with two sticks and string, and make soap bubbles large enough for a child to stand in. 

For the Fall Festival, Country Cousins will offer fresh apple cider and ice cream slushies. On Saturday, there will be huckleberry donuts as well. 

“Our family goes up and picks huckleberries in the mountains every year,” Phillips said. “So, we thought because this is the first year, we haven’t had the store open year-round, we wanted to do something to draw people in. And we thought, we have enough frozen huckleberries, we’ll put huckleberries in the donuts just for the opening Saturday.” 

Until this year, Country Cousins maintained a store with fresh produce from spring until the end of October, but this year they’ve been renting out the facility as a wedding venue instead, Phillips explained. 

Country Cousins has been operating at the same location since 2015. It’s owned by Phillips, her parents and her two brothers, and run by their various descendants. 

“My parents have 51 grandchildren, and they … really wanted a place where their grandchildren could learn to work and could come stay with them over the summer,” Phillips said. “Every one of my seven children have worked at the store, and many other grandchildren have (too), and that’s the reason it’s called Country Cousins.” 

There’s so much to do at Country Cousins, Phillips said, that families often spend four hours or more exploring and playing. There are barrel rolls, hayrides on a little train pulled behind an ATV and duck races, where children can pump water into a little chute to propel a rubber duck. There are also little potato cannons kids can shoot off, which is fun on a smaller scale than Freeman’s pumpkin cannon. 

Despite the variety, Country Cousins has a certain rural appeal, Phillips said. 

“It has a hometown feel,” she said. “We get repeat customers from Spokane and Seattle and Tri-Cities and Moses Lake, I think because it doesn’t feel like a big production. It feels like a family-owned and -run business, and I think people enjoy that, and it accommodates a lot of people really well, so it doesn’t feel so crowded.” 

    Kids get ready to race their ducks at Country Cousins, south of Othello.
  

    “Grandpa” Dave Freeman’s pumpkin cannon can fling a gourd as much as a quarter mile. He’ll fire it off every hour on the hour this Friday and Saturday at the Country Cousins Fall Festival.
  

    The zip line is a popular attraction at Country Cousins.
  

    Children play in the corn pit at Country Cousins. The pit is mostly for kids, said co-owner Amy Freeman Phillips, but grownups sometimes find it therapeutic as well.