The Fair

How I feel about living in the Pacific Northwest varies depending upon the time of year.  In fall, I am thrilled with the glorious color, the crispness in the air, and those incredible apples!  In winter, I'm delighted to actually have snow!  Spring is a low point, particularly April.  The month of April should be full of flowers and at least cool sunshine.  Instead, it's rain, rain, rain.  May's not too bad, but June, aka "June-uary" is a bitter disappointment, with constant rain until July 5th.

But summer, ahh summer!  Probably nowhere on the planet has such a glorious summer as happens right outside my door.  And the high water mark of summer, for me, is the fair, which embodies everything I love about living here - snowy mountain views, the smell of hay, jewel-bright berries, and running into friends everywhere we go.

The fair animals are amazing - pigs, cows, sheep, chickens, rabbits, horses and a few less-familiar critters.  This year camel rides were offered!  I feel so back-to-nature when I walk around looking at (and smelling) all these animals.  The jersey cows have such huge doe eyes, and I think the highland cattle are absolutely adorable.  Every year I come dangerously  close to bringing home a bunny.  I've watched a cow give birth; how often do you get to see that?

I also like the agriculture exhibits.  Our county produces all kinds of useful stuff - milk and cheese, berries, apples, timber - and seeing the bounty makes me sappily proud to live  here.  Not that I produce anything, but I'm kind of proud of others' work!  Every year I swear that our zucchini is bigger and that Karl's jam is redder, and I plan to enter something next year...but I never do.  Brennan and I thought it was funny to see blackberries entered in the produce section, since you can pick them in roadside ditches all over town!

One of my favorite parts of the fair is the quilt exhibit.  I'm amazed at the creativity and intricacy of these artworks in cloth, and I always come home determined to try my hand at one.  So far, I've produced half a quilt.  I vow, once again, to do better.

Then there's the food.  I'm not normally much into junk food, but the fair provides a junk food extravaganza that's hard to beat.  Just once a year, we have to have a loaf of curly fries, made from the biggest potatoes I've ever seen, and cut into impossibly long strings on a hand drill.  My one complaint is that they're always undercooked.  But it's still amazing to eat a two foot long french fry!  

And how about cheesecake on a stick - frozen cheesecake, encased in chocolate and impaled for your dining pleasure.  We didn't actually have the cheesecake this year, but I did allow myself to be talked into getting the Chocolate Supreme Funnel Cake.  It was as good as it looks.

There are also fat gyros, turkey legs, roasted corn, loaded nachos, bottomless lemonade, massive burgers, and virtually anything fried - oreos, brownies, twinkies, ice cream and butter.  I sat next to the deep-fried stand, hoping to see someone order deep-fried butter, but no such luck.  I'm feeling a little queasy just reading this!

My absolute favorite part of the fair is the horse show.  It's not the kind of horse show I used to do - jacket-clad girls in English saddles with velvet helmets and not a hair out of place.  Instead, we watch pole-racing cowgirls, brave little tots clinging desperately to the woolly backs of sheep in hopes of winning the sheep race, teams of huge draft horses trotting around the barely-big-enough arena, and the Crazy Eights.  We may be one of the few fairs in the country to feature the Crazy Eights, teams of eight miniature draft horses that race around the arena together in a terrifying free-for-all.  Last year, two teams actually crashed, resulting in some broken harness and a few limping horses.  This year, the teams narrowly avoided disaster, to the gasping delight of the audience.

After the teams finish, pairs of mini-draft horses return for thrilling chariot races!

This year, Karl got us tickets to see The Guess Who.  Because the band has been around since the 60s, we were definitely the youngsters in the audience, and it was fun to see senior citizens rocking out in AC/DC t-shirts.  This is the second concert I've seen at the fair, and the acoustics are, well, painful.  Although we got a nice, close-up view of the (septuagenarian) band, the sound was painfully loud, even with the earplugs Karl remembered to bring.  And did I mention that it was raining?  Heavily.  We  moved up to the back of the stands under the roof, but the sound booms into the covered inside stadium and was infinitely worse!  But we still had fun. :-)

And so we returned home wet, tired, full of creative plans, and filled with the unique smells of hay, fried food, and wet pavement.