Free to walk in and free to park, then everything costs $1 tickets — which makes a short visit genuinely cheap and a do-everything day quietly expensive.
Admission and parking are free. Attractions run on $1 tickets: mechanical rides 4 tickets, straw maze 3, corn maze 5, Animal Land Zoo 6, Pumpkin Playland 6, pony rides 8, camel rides 8. Weekend-only: horse-drawn wagon ride 5, silly string 7, draft horse ride 8.
Free to walk in. Your spend here is whatever you choose — pumpkins, food, and any paid activities. That makes it a low-risk stop if you are not sure how long the kids will last.
The pricing model here is unusual for the North Shore and it deserves a straight explanation, because it changes how you should plan the day. You do not pay to get in and you do not pay to park. Once inside, every attraction has a price in $1 tickets: the straw maze is 3, a mechanical ride is 4, the corn maze is 5, the Animal Land Zoo and Pumpkin Playland are 6 each, and pony and camel rides are 8 apiece. On weekends the horse-drawn wagon ride adds 5, silly string 7 and the draft horse ride 8.
For a family that wants pumpkins, a wander and one or two things, this is the cheapest real fall outing in the area. Two small children doing the Pumpkin Playland and the straw maze is 18 tickets — $18, with the adults free at the gate and free in the lot. Nothing gated in Lake or Will County comes close to that.
For a family that wants to do everything, the arithmetic flips. Two children doing the corn maze, straw maze, Pumpkin Playland, the zoo, a mechanical ride, a pony ride and a camel ride is 40 tickets each: $80 before pumpkins or food. That is more than most flat-rate farms charge for a family of four, and it arrives one small decision at a time, which is exactly what makes it hard to control.
So the honest advice is to decide before you reach the ticket booth. Buy a fixed number of tickets per child, hand them over, and let them choose. It converts a day of negotiation into a day of budgeting, and children handle the second far better than adults expect.
The schedule is genuinely different, not just quieter. Three of the more memorable attractions — the horse-drawn wagon, the draft horse ride and silly string — are weekend-only. A Wednesday visit is calmer, easier to park and cheaper in the sense that the expensive things are not on offer, but a child who came specifically for a horse-drawn wagon ride will be told no. Check what your household actually came for.
Every Tuesday is closed, all season. That is the single most likely trip-wrecker on this page, because a farm open six days a week reads in the memory as open every day.
The run is September 16 to October 31, 2026, with a 6pm close throughout. That same 6pm means something different at each end: in mid-September it is comfortably before dark, and by Halloween it is close to dusk with the temperature already dropping. Northern Illinois autumn evenings on open farmland get cold faster than people dress for, and layers beat one heavy jacket because the middle of the afternoon can still be warm.
The festival site itself warns that hours change without notice in bad weather. That is worth taking seriously in October, which is the wet month here. A quick look at the site or a call the morning of costs nothing and saves the drive.
One more small timing note from the record: the donut shop opened a week ahead of the festival itself. If you are near Lincolnshire in early September and the fest has not started, the farmstand side is already running — which is a reasonable low-effort visit in its own right, and it costs nothing at all.
September 16 through October 31, 2026, Wednesday to Monday, 10am to 6pm, closed every Tuesday. A weekday is the cheap, quiet version but a noticeably thinner one: the horse-drawn wagon ride, the draft horse ride and silly string all run weekends only. If those matter to your children, you need a Saturday or Sunday and you should arrive near the 10am open.
Two to three hours. With no gate charge there is no pressure to extract value from a ticket, so this is one of the few farms where a genuinely short visit makes sense.
Free entry lowers the barrier, and a six-day week over roughly six and a half weeks spreads demand better than a weekends-only festival does. Expect the ride and animal queues, not the gate, to be the bottleneck on October weekends.
Free, per the festival's own site. The surface is not published; assume the usual North Shore farm mix of gravel and grass, which turns soft after October rain.
Not published. Call 847-383-6958 before travelling if you need to know about surfaces or the route between attractions.
You have several children who will want to do everything. The a la carte model rewards restraint and punishes a full sweep — pony and camel rides are 8 tickets each, and the weekend draft horse ride is another 8. Skip a midweek trip too if the horse-drawn wagon or draft horse ride is the point, because both are weekend-only.
This is a farm outing rather than a day trip, and it sits close enough to the rest of Lake County that pairing it with lunch elsewhere is easy. If you want the big-ticket version of the same afternoon, the gated attraction farms further west and south are a different kind of day at four times the price.
No. Admission and parking are both free. Individual attractions are paid with $1 tickets: 3 for the straw maze, 4 for a mechanical ride, 5 for the corn maze, 6 for the Animal Land Zoo or Pumpkin Playland, and 8 each for pony and camel rides.
It depends entirely on how much you buy. Two children doing the corn maze, straw maze and Pumpkin Playland is 28 tickets, or $28, with parents walking alongside. Adding a pony ride and a camel ride each takes it to $60. Pumpkins, donuts and food are on top.
The horse-drawn wagon ride (5 tickets), silly string (7) and the draft horse ride (8) are listed as weekend-only. Everything else runs on the regular Wednesday-to-Monday schedule.
Yes — Didier Farms rebranded its long-running Pumpkin Fest as Happy Times Pumpkin Fest, and didierfarms.com now redirects to the festival site. Same Aptakisic Road location in the Prairie View part of Lincolnshire.
September 16 – October 31, 2026. Wednesday through Monday (closed Tuesdays). Hours: 10am-6pm.
Admission is free. Admission and parking are free. Attractions run on $1 tickets: mechanical rides 4 tickets, straw maze 3, corn maze 5, Animal Land Zoo 6, Pumpkin Playland 6, pony rides 8, camel rides 8. Weekend-only: horse-drawn wagon ride 5, silly string 7, draft horse ride 8.
16678 Aptakisic Rd, Lincolnshire, IL 60069, in Lake County. It is one of 9 patches we track in Chicago Suburbs.
We track 9 patches in Chicago Suburbs, 2 of which are free to walk into. Entry here costs nothing, which puts it in the minority even in a region with several free options.
Its season runs about 46 days against a regional average of 48, so it is broadly in line with the rest of the region.
What sets it apart locally: it has a market, bakery or taproom, which most Chicago Suburbs patches on our list do not.
There are 6 other patches we track in Lake County. All Chicago Suburbs patches →
happytimespumpkinfest.com · didierfarms.com
Checked August 2026.