Will the fun never end? Having lived within a mile of the Alameda County Fairgrounds for the last 15 years, we have only once gone to the fair. And that was only because Jonathan was singing there. But we’re on vacation! Time to do wild and crazy things. So today we bundled up and headed to the fair which was about 25 miles inland from here – in the middle of nowhere. Who would come to this fair? Judging from the parking lot, a lot of people from Oregon, one car from California, and one car in stealth mode with Utah plates (ours).
Now here’s something you may not know. When John was at MIT he was in a fraternity and had nicknames. One was Ponch, for Pontius Pilate and the other was llama because of a long upper lip. Now I’ve never thought of John’s upper lip as freakishly long but I took a picture of a county fair llama. You be the judge.
We enjoyed looking at the animals and watching girls on horseback doing dressage. We went to a technical judging of llamas and learned lots of new facts about them. For instance, their offspring are called crias. We saw sheep that looked like Cousin It. We looked at lots of jarred fruit and vegetables as well as platesful of cookies. There were quilts and knitted garments. Almost everything had some sort of ribbon on it. It seemed much like when the kids were on swim team. You got a ribbon no matter what. Yay, seventh place out of seven. Perhaps we never taught them how to deal with defeat.
Finally, we watched a guy do chainsaw art. He started with his big chainsaw and gradually worked down to the more precise chainsaws. He never paused. Never stepped back to evaluate his work. He just kept sawing at his masterpiece until it became a bear holding a “welcome” sign. You’ll notice that he’s concerned about his hearing but not so much his eyesight.
Tomorrow we head up to Astoria, Oregon. The sun finally came out today around 5 PM and we are hoping for warmer (but not too warm) weather in the future.