Sunday, October 21, 2007

Bowling Green Harvest Festival


Yes, we’re still hunting harvest festivals, and this weekend we went to two. Saturday was a beautiful day, so we took the ride in the country down to Bowling Green for the Harvest Festival, which turned out to be a surprisingly big event. It wasn’t very harvesty...other than a kids’ pumpkin decorating station, it could have been a street festival celebrating just about anything. At one end of the festival area, there was a huge classic car show, then we moved on to the antique tractors, then to the petting zoo (with the animals in depressingly and unnecessarily small enclosures), and at the end of the block, there were amusement park rides, carnival games, and a rock-climbing wall. In between were all of the vendors. I just never get tired of walking down rows and rows of vendors, even if they are hawking things I have absolutely no interest in. In fact, it’s almost always stuff I have no interest in, but I always have this great feeling of anticipation that the next vendor will be the one selling some amazing, beautifully crafted and surprisingly affordable something.

This being election season, every Caroline County candidate had a booth set up, so there were buttons and bumper stickers flying. Plus there were lots of churches selling crafts or yard sale stuff or running raffles, including one clever church giving out free cookies with a Bible verse and a church ad attached (doesn’t matter to me...free cookies are free cookies). There was all the usual southern street festival food: the barbecue, the fried fish, the funnel cakes, and we managed to sample quite a bit before moving on to another pumpkin festival just a few minutes’ drive away (but more about that one tomorrow).

Kid-painted pumpkins:

An alpaca from the petting zoo:

This is honestly one of the ugliest "crafts" I've ever seen. They are lampshades, in case you couldn't tell:

Clearly it doesn't take much to amuse me, because I thought this pelican trash can was photo-worthy:

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