Pie Town

6 Tips for a Successful Pie Fest

Tips for a Successful Family Outing to the Pie Festival

  1. The Pie Town Pie Festival has a website with a list of activities and times. While the sign up for the pie eating contests begin at 9 a.m., there’s no reason to get there right on time to sign up. You can sign up right up until contest time assuming there is enough pie to go around.
  2. The best time to get to the Pie Festival is between 10:30 and 11:30 a.m. The main activities begin at noon, and it doesn’t take more than an hour to tour all of the vendor booths and to get your first slice of pie.
  3. Speaking of pie, it’s better to buy your full pies for the road sooner, rather than later. We debated whether or not to buy pies right away. We decided to wait and many of the popular pies were sold out by the time we were ready to head home.
  4. There are a few activities for the kids to do beyond the junior pie eating contest, but you’ll need to keep an eye on them the entire time. The festival is held at a park, so there’s a swing set, a slide and a jungle gym. The slide is one of the biggest I’ve seen, and judging by the amount of kids I saw face-planted at the bottom, it’s a very fast slide. There was nothing unusual about the swing set, but there was a large number of people who walked way too close to swinging kids and almost ended up with black eyes. Pie can lull you into a dangerous state of not paying attention, apparently. There’s also a giant pie of dirt where organizers hide little toys for the kids to find. However, they left behind an adult sized metal shovel for the kids to dig with. Put together a bunch of kids and an adult sized shovel — trouble and concussions are bound to happen.
  5. If you have access to horned toads, don’t forget to bring your speediest and most well-trained for the afternoon horned toad races.
  6. Pie Town is a very small town. There isn’t a gas station, so be sure to fill up in neighboring towns, like Datil or Magdalena.

I hope these tips can help you have a very successful and stress-free Pie Town Pie Festival 2015.