This year for Thanksgiving, we decided to spend it with my wife’s family in Santa Cruz. Our son would take the train from Davis to Santa Clara and we’d pick him up at the train station. Since we were going to be seeing him, he had a list of things for us to bring him such as his camping gear, laundry soap, a suitcase so he could use it to come home on winter break and plastic containers to store leftover food. One thing he also put on the list was Costco pumpkin pie. He doesn’t have a car nor a Costco membership, so he wouldn’t be able to get one himself. I suspect pies will be back (or still here) when he comes back for winter break, but he wanted pumpkin pie to bring back to school.

I spent a few days collecting things from his list and trying to figure out how we were going to get him a pie to take back to school. We drove up (I need to remind myself not to do that again even if traveling by plane on the busiest week of the year could be a nightmare, it can’t be as bad as driving), I did some research and because the pie contains eggs and milk, it needs to be refrigerated. I mentioned this to my wife and she wasn’t as convinced as me that it needed to be cold as lots of baked goods can be kept out and has dairy and egg.

I had considered picking up the pie at home and taking it up there, but I was leary about keeping it cold. So how was I going to get my son the pumpkin pie?

Pumpkin Pie Picture

The day before Thanksgiving, my wife and I went to Costco in Santa Cruz (it was less crowded than our local Costco on a normal day which amazed me) to pick up the pie. The pies were in the refrigerated produce area, so my wife agreed that it needed to be kept cold for the whole journey and sent our son a message saying that we weren’t going to get him a pie because we couldn’t keep it cold and safe back to school. He sent her back a sad emoji and pleaded with her to get the pie.

We picked up one pie to take to Thanksgiving and our son was going to have to make due. When my wife put the pie in the cart, I saw that it was only $5.99, so I said to get another one and we’d figure out how to get as much of the pie back to school for him.

Our hotel room had a small refrigerator that wouldn’t possibly hold an entire pie right from Costo, so we took the pies to my brother-in-law’s house as we were having Thanksgiving dinner there. After Thanksgiving, we weren’t going back to my brother-in-law’s house, so I sent a full pie with my in-laws as we’d be seeing them the next day; we took the remainder of the pie back to our hotel and I stuffed it in the refrigerator (I took it out of the plastic and folded the tin over as there was about half left). So now the pie was at my in-laws’ and still a long way from getting back to school with our son.

The day after Thanksgiving, I picked the two largest plastic storage containers we brought up and checked to see if they would fit in the hotel refrigerator; they did which was great! When we got to my in-laws’, I took the full pie out of the refrigerator and sliced it up stuffing it in the two containers. With the exception of 2 pieces that my son and wife ate, I was able to fit the pie in the plastic containers! Things were looking good, but not out of the woods, yet.

On the final day of the trip when we had to get our son to the train station, my wife took a bunch of the other plastic containers and filled them with ice. We them put the containers in plastic bags and put them in the suitcase along with the pie. I’m not sure what shape the pie would end up in when the suitcase was turned sideways and then upright, but that wasn’t a problem I was going to solve.

We got our son to the train station and he took the 2.5 hour trip back to Davis. When he got there, he let us know that the pie was still cold when he put it in his refrigerator a school. Mission successful!

What I’ve learned from Operation Pumpkin Pie:

  • Pumpkin pie must be kept cold (I have no idea why other pies don’t).
  • An entire Costco sized pumpkin pie can fit in 2 large plastic containers.
  • We can keep a pie cold for several hours in a suitcase surrounded by ice.