Pandas/Google BigQuery: Schema mismatch makes the upload fail

The schema in my google table looks like this:

price_datetime : DATETIME,
symbol         : STRING,
bid_open       : FLOAT,
bid_high       : FLOAT,
bid_low        : FLOAT,
bid_close      : FLOAT,
ask_open       : FLOAT,
ask_high       : FLOAT,
ask_low        : FLOAT,
ask_close      : FLOAT

After I do a pandas.read_gbq I get a dataframe with column dtypes like this:

price_datetime     object
symbol             object
bid_open          float64
bid_high          float64
bid_low           float64
bid_close         float64
ask_open          float64
ask_high          float64
ask_low           float64
ask_close         float64
dtype: object

Now I want to use to_gbq so I convert my local dataframe (which I just made) from these dtypes:

price_datetime    datetime64[ns]
symbol                    object
bid_open                 float64
bid_high                 float64
bid_low                  float64
bid_close                float64
ask_open                 float64
ask_high                 float64
ask_low                  float64
ask_close                float64
dtype: object

to these dtypes:

price_datetime     object
symbol             object
bid_open          float64
bid_high          float64
bid_low           float64
bid_close         float64
ask_open          float64
ask_high          float64
ask_low           float64
ask_close         float64
dtype: object

by doing:

df['price_datetime'] = df['price_datetime'].astype(object)

Now I (think) I am read to use to_gbq so I do:

import pandas
pandas.io.gbq.to_gbq(df, <table_name>, <project_name>, if_exists='append')

but I get the error:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
InvalidSchema                             Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-15-d5a3f86ad382> in <module>()
      1 a = time.time()
----> 2 pandas.io.gbq.to_gbq(df, <table_name>, <project_name>, if_exists='append')
      3 b = time.time()
      4 
      5 print(b-a)

C:\Users\me\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pandas\io\gbq.py in to_gbq(dataframe, destination_table, project_id, chunksize, verbose, reauth, if_exists, private_key)
    825         elif if_exists == 'append':
    826             if not connector.verify_schema(dataset_id, table_id, table_schema):
--> 827                 raise InvalidSchema("Please verify that the structure and "
    828                                     "data types in the DataFrame match the "
    829                                     "schema of the destination table.")

InvalidSchema: Please verify that the structure and data types in the DataFrame match the schema of the destination table.