Our Trip Out West, Part 1: High Pressure Snacks

We didn’t count on the potato chip bag exploding.

Last week we bundled ourselves and an astonishing amount of stuff into the van and headed west.  Our ultimate goal was Rocky Mountain National Park, a lovely spot that Kim and I had visited nearly two decades ago and which we thought the girls would enjoy.  As is our habit on such trips, we raided the local grocery store and came back with an intense amount of road food.

Road food has no nutritional value.  It is, in fact, negatively nutritious.  It actively sucks nutrients out of your body with every bite you take, and as such it is both delicious and required for any drive that crosses at least two state lines.  We had sugary treats.  We had salty treats – all of which I had declared acceptable, new diet be damned, because that’s what vacations are for, after all.  We had treats in bags.  We had treats in tubes.  We had treats in packages.  There may even have been treats in boxes tied with ribbons.  If our car broke down in western Nebraska and we had to huddle together for warmth on the prairie until help arrived we wouldn’t have to resort to cannibalism for – what? – weeks, and that kind of guarantee is a comfort to the traveler’s mind.

But you see, here is the thing.  Wisconsin is nearly at sea level, and our elevation is measured in hundreds of feet.  The elevation of our destination, however, is measured in thousands.  There are a few things that change as you make that climb.  For one thing, the air gets thin and it is hard to breathe and why we were vacationing in a place with no oxygen is an interesting question.  For another, the implication of thinner air is that the air pressure goes down as your elevation goes up.

We noticed this about ten miles from Estes Park, Colorado, when Tabitha discovered that the potato chip bags had all expanded to a rigid and quite frankly alarming fullness.  They had no give to them whatsoever.

This was cause for great amusement, until one of them blew up.

Fortunately, it burst out the bottom.  On the plus side, this meant that we were not showered with the salty oily shrapnel of nutrition-free goodness.  On the down side, it meant that the back seat and floor of the van were now covered in a thin layer of pulverized deep fried potato slices – a layer that would prove difficult to clean out once we arrived at our destination, which had signs prominently warning us, “Do not keep food in your car, or else the bears will break in to get it.”

Great.  We were vacationing in a place with negative oxygen and positive bears.  It turned out surprisingly well, though.

How we got there is a long story.

We usually head east for our summer road trips.  My side of the family is mostly out in that general direction, as are many of my friends.  There are real Philadelphia cheesesteaks.  There is the Jersey shore.  If we have time we can sometimes get up to New York. 

But this year diversification was in the air, so Rocky Mountain National Park it was.

We left on a clear and pleasant Monday morning, got about thirty miles, and then turned around to collect Tabitha’s purse, which she had left at home.  The retrieval of forgotten objects would turn out to be a running theme.

Our plan was to head west across southern Wisconsin and northern Iowa – my old route to graduate school, back when I had moved up to Our Little Town and was still taking classes at the University of Iowa – and have lunch at the Hamburg Inn #2 in Iowa City. 

For those of you who have not had this pleasure, well, you should correct that situation.  The Hamburg Inn #2 in Iowa City is the best little diner in the midwest even if you sometimes have to park in Ames.  We had a lovely lunch.

West of Des Moines, Iowa flattens out and you enter the long, flat miles of the Great Plains.  It’s green, though, and there are occasional towns and land features to keep you interested, such as the giant wind turbines with blades half again as big as the ones in Wisconsin, providing electrical power that nobody has to go to war over (which is why it is not popular among the right wing these days).  There are farms and trees.  It’s a pleasant drive.

And then you get to Nebraska, which is like western Iowa only more stretched out.  You have to focus a bit more.  Fortunately, we also brought cards.

We stopped for the night in Kearney, a bump along I-90 that has a number of hotels and restaurants, and from what we could tell is populated by very nice and helpful people. 

Dinner was at a Runza.

We were told by a Nebraskan friend of ours that when one travels in Nebraska, dining at a Runza is a must.  Further, when doing so it is obligatory to have a Runza sandwich.  I took the plunge.

A Runza sandwich is a six-inch roll filled with ground beef, cabbage, onions, and spices.  If you’re familiar with eastern European cooking, it’s essentially a holopchi sandwich.  It was quite tasty, though one was enough.

Tuesday morning got off to a slow start.  For one thing, the hotel we stayed at came with a light breakfast and the breakfast came with an extremely chatty hostess.  For another, the tire light that had worried us all trip turned out not to be a hoax.

When we bought the van the dealership made a point of saying that the tire pressure warning light was the thing that people most complained about in this model, that it would often give false warnings and the thing to do was to examine the tires if it went on and if they looked okay to just keep driving.  The light came on about a mile into our trip and stayed on until we got to Kearney.  Every time we’d stop we’d examine all the tires, and they all looked fine.

Except on Tuesday morning it was clear that the light had not been a hoax after all.  The passenger rear tire looked sad and weak.  Fortunately, directly across the street from our hotel was a place that replaced tires – a place that had a tire guy (a skinny young man named Braedon) who was willing to squeeze us in.  It turned out that somewhere we had picked up a nail just off the tread, so the tire could not be repaired.  It also turned out he had a replacement, and half an hour later – new tire installed – we were on our way.

Thanks, Braedon!

Western Nebraska is for people who think that western Iowa is too exciting.  It flattens out further and begins to rise toward the High Plains, the towns and features get further and further apart, and they put billboards every so often so you can tell that you’re moving.

And then you get to eastern Colorado, which is for people who think western Nebraska was too exciting.  It’s just mile after mile after mile of open grazing land, hypnotic in its way, but distressingly vacant for this city-dweller’s tastes.

Naturally we cranked up Supertramp’s old album, Breakfast in America, for this part of the trip.  Doesn’t everyone?

We liked entering Colorado so much that we did it twice.

About an hour or so into Colorado Kim realized that she had left her purse at the rest stop where we had eaten lunch in western Nebraska, just about where you leave I-80 and get on I-76 headed for Denmark, capital of Colorado (don’t ask – apparently it’s a long-running inside joke among Tabitha’s friends, so I’m going to go with it).  Oddly enough, that had been a Runza too.

We called them, and yes, they had Kim’s purse safe and sound in their safe and would we please come get it?  So we did.  An hour and a half back to Nebraska.  An hour and a half back to where we were when we realized something was not right.  And then: onward.

Eastern Colorado is basically flat and grassy, even if it does angle upward the whole time.  It’s like that for a long, long, time.  And then – BOOM! – mountains.  And then – BOOM! – exploding potato chips.

It was an auspicious beginning even so.

Return of the Travelers

You forget how big this world is.

Every time I hear some idiot talking about how their latest project, the most recent political scandal, the newest trend, or some other event that looms large in their personal space will change the world forever, I ask myself, “Do they even know how big the world is?  What does this mean to some guy in Peru?”

We drove across a very small subsection of the world over the last week and change.

We left Wisconsin on the 17th, spent a few lovely days in Colorado, and then came home via every tourist attraction in South Dakota.  We had a grand time, and more will be said here shortly.

But the thing that this trip impressed upon my mind was simply how big the world is and how little one gets to see of it.  We drove across mile after mile after mile of open space (Wyoming, for example, which as near as I can tell has fourteen people in it – all of them using the pumps that I wished to use at a gas station in Lusk) and still only went through a fraction of what we could have seen.

It’s good to be home.

There are vista people and there are wall people, and I’m happy to be back inside my home with my books and my stuff. 

But I’m glad I went.

The State Fair Beckons!

Lauren and I got back to Our Little Town around 6pm last Saturday.  Thirteen hours later, we were headed to the State Fair.

The main purpose of this quick turnaround goes all the way back to May, when the 4H Drama Troupe won the Drama Festival.  The kids did a really nice job with their play – they wrote it, they rehearsed it under Jamie and Kim’s able direction, and they performed it with energy and flair on the day.  For this they got blue ribbons and invitations to perform at both the County Fair and the State Fair.

This is the first time we’ve done both fairs.  Two years ago they went to the State Fair but skipped the County Fair because too many cast members had too many other commitments during the Fair.  Last year we decided to stick with the County Fair and give the State Fair a pass because the cast was simply too large and had too many scheduling conflicts.  This year we performed at the County Fair on the 1st, and agreed to the State Fair on the 9th.

In between, Lauren and I went to Philadelphia.  Because we could.

If you’ve never been to the Wisconsin State Fair, it’s pretty much everything you’d think it would be.  There are innumerable vendors selling everything from leather goods to toys (mostly not of leather – for those you have to go to a rather different sort of venue).  There are displays of 4H art, photography, and other projects – my favorite this year being the chicken sculpted entirely of old egg shells.  I hope it won an award.  There’s a midway, of course, though we skipped it this year.  There is a giant building filled with nothing but stalls trying to sell you an even wider array of things than the vendors outside – everything from gutters to beads to hot sauces.  Seriously, there are probably five hundred vendors in that building.  Word of advice – stay away from any hot sauce labeled “Da Bomb,” as it has no flavor but burns with the heat of a thousand suns.  I am too old for that.

There is also food.  Food of almost every description.  There are steaks.  There are hot dogs, sausages, bratwursts, and ice creams.  There are cream puffs.  Lauren had poutine, and seemed to enjoy it.  There is a place that sells nothing but grilled cheese sandwiches (Tabitha reported that they were quite good), and another where you can get some of the best pastrami on rye outside of New York City.  There are so many kinds of food for sale that the State Fair has its own app dedicated to them.  There’s an entire subsection of the app labeled “Foods on a Stick.”

I kid you not.

And there are animals, of course.  Cattle.  Chickens.  Rabbits.  Goats.  Sheep.  Pigs.  No turkeys, though – not sure why.  We looked at most of them during the day, and honestly Maybelline could clean up at the State Fair – there were no Dwarf Hotot rabbits at all!  She’d have the field all to herself!  Hello state champion!

But mostly we were there for the theater.

They’ve moved the stage since the last time we were there.  Two years ago it was a semi-enclosed area tucked between two buildings – covered at the stage end, open at the audience end.  This year that area was filled with giant tractors, which may or may not be some kind of commentary but if it is I don’t know what it is supposed to be saying.  The stage and all of its surroundings have been moved to the north to a brand new building, entirely enclosed, with the theater stuff at one end and 4H exhibits at the other.  That’s where the eggshell chicken was.

Our troupe was scheduled for two performances, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

The morning performance went off largely without a hitch.  Everyone showed up on time.  Everyone remembered their lines.  The sound system worked.  The acting was energetic.  They did a marvelous job.

After the play we let the girls have the run of the State Fair.  It is a strange thing to realize that your children are old enough and responsible enough to do that – there is always going to be a piece of you that says “No!  Clearly they are still kindergartners and need my supervision at all times!”  And then they look at you from about the same height and you remember being that age and your own parents letting you wander around and you think, “Well, okay, maybe not.  Have a good time!”

And they did. 

Kim and I wandered around looking at the animals and the projects, and eventually Grandma and Grandpa came by with Cousins Brody and Marin and we continued to wander around.  It was good to see them.  But eventually it came time for the afternoon performance, and we headed back to the stage.

It turned out we didn’t have to hurry, as they were running nearly an hour behind schedule, but there we were.  Eventually the show started.

The second performance went very well from our perspective, but for some reason the sound guys didn’t actually turn on the mics until 4 minutes into a 12-minute play, which made the first part more of a pantomime than a play.  But by this point I’d pretty much memorized the script anyway, so I could fill in the details.

The kids did a very good job, and then it was over.

We walked around the fair a bit after that, and we rode the Sky Ride across the fair when it was time to go home.  We didn’t stay as late as we did two years ago, but even so it was a fourteen-hour day.

We’re late, but we have an exceptionally exceptional excuse!

Traveling East

I’m still catching up on a week’s worth of life.  This story is why I am so far behind, as I try not to write when I am on vacation.  There is a subtle difference between that and not writing because I’m being lazy, or because I’m too busy with work, or because I just don’t feel like writing or have anything really to say, but it’s an important difference.  It is to me, anyway.

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The day after the County Fair ended, Lauren and I headed out for Philadelphia.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  First we took Milkshake – Lauren’s now-retired show bunny – to the vet.

Regular readers of this space will of course recall that Milkshake had already been to the vet not a week earlier due to the vicious eye infection that he seemed to have contracted the weekend before the Fair officially opened, and the Crisis that this had entailed.  That visit went fairly well, and the vet had simply advised us to keep giving him his antibiotics and putting oils and unguents on both the surrounding tissue and the eye itself, a task that mostly fell to Kim since she has the veterinary training in the house.  Ask any chemist, and the odds are you will find someone who once thought they would become a veterinarian and then ran into college-level biology and switched over to something more congenial to their tastes, like high-powered chemistry. 

Said the liberal arts guy.

Milkshake stabilized under this treatment plan, but did not really improve.  By that Monday morning we were pretty much convinced that the second option recommended by the vet – surgery – was the way to go.  So at 8am Lauren and I found ourselves at the vet’s office, where we learned a new word (“enucleation” – look it up) and consented on Milkshake’s behalf.  The surgery was scheduled for later that morning, when we would be on the road.

And then we left.

Well, that’s not entirely true either.  First we gave all of Lauren’s chickens a bath.

The reason Kim had not accompanied us with the rabbit was that she was getting the chickens ready for their cleansing, so they could go back to the barn without infecting any of the various other critters there with nasties picked up at the Fair.  The Fair had been a pretty uneventful one from a chicken mortality perspective – rather a surprise, in this summer of avian flu – so mostly we were concerned with mites and other similar stowaways.  So a quick bath in Poultry Protector seemed to be the answer.

There is still nothing quite so ridiculous as a wet chicken.  No, not even that.  Nice try, though.

Eventually they dried off and we got them set up in the barn.  The big roosters we enclosed in spaces of their own, since they have reached the age where they are getting their rooster on and can’t be left together, and then we went back home and filled up the van with our gear.

And then we left.

For real, this time.

It was a fairly short trip, designed entirely to visit my parents.  We are all getting older now, and when opportunities to visit come up we try to take them.  Kim and Tabitha both had to work that week, unfortunately, so it was just myself and my youngest daughter for a thousand miles across the American landscape, if Ohio and Indiana can be considered landscape.

Road trip!

We stopped on the outskirts of Our Little Town and raided the supermarket for road food, none of which had any nutritional value whatsoever.  We filled up the van with gas.  We settled in.  And then – the open road!  Or as open as it gets during Construction Season, anyway.

We spent a night in our usual hotel in the outskirts of Cleveland, dodging the storm that blew in just after we checked in.  Lauren spent the evening in the pool while I read my book.  Kim called with the news from Milkshake, whose surgery had gone well.  It turned out not to be an infection, though if you ever want to eat again you will not ask what it actually was.  We’re thinking of getting Milkshake a tiny little eyepatch and a sword and renaming him The Dread Pirate Milkshake (at least I’m thinking of that – I can’t vouch for any of the others).  He has spent the last two weeks recuperating and is now back to his old bunny self, if rather lacking in the depth-perception department, which is more than I can say for our checking account as bunny surgeons are apparently a rare and precious commodity and their time is measured in platinum ingots.  Oh well.

But we slept well knowing that all was resolved, and the next morning we headed out for the final leg of our journey.

It was a lovely visit.

We did our level best to overdose on cheesesteaks.  Uncle Keith came down from New York for an overnight and we took Lauren to the Giant Oversized Mall for a brief expedition before returning home to a four-person Phase 10 game (Lauren beat all of us).  She and I even went to Center City and hit both the Reading Terminal Market and Chinatown.

I’m not really sure why anatomically correct organs made of chocolate are a thing, but I’m glad that they limited themselves to internal ones.  They also had lungs.  And this was at the Reading Terminal Market.  The shops in Chinatown had more straightforward oddities, though since the signs were in Mandarin we mostly had to guess at what they were.

We all went out to eat a couple of times: to the local Mexican place for dinner on Wednesday – word of advice: never get an order of nachos if you will be the only one going to eat it, as it will be tasty enough to try but far too big to succeed and this will be suboptimal if you are not a teenage male who can eat anything in any quantity and not feel it the next day – and another lunch on Friday, before we left.

But mostly the point of the visit was simply to visit – to catch up and talk in person with family.  I have a great many friends who do not enjoy spending time their family, and I have therefore always treasured the fact that I do.  We are good people with each other, and there isn’t enough time in the world to spend with them.  We take what time we can.

Friday afternoon we headed back west, stopping in Pittsburgh to visit Mike and Eli (Krista being out of town, unfortunately).  Mike made a wonderful dinner for us, and then we worked most of it off walking to get frozen yogurt.  If you’ve never been to Pittsburgh, just know that there is exactly one stretch of level ground in the entire metro area.  It is six yards long and someday they will declare it a local monument and schoolchildren will take field trips to see it.  You get your exercise walking in Pittsburgh. 

But again, the point was to visit, and visit we did.

We live too far away from too many people.

Lauren and I got home Saturday night, and if you think that meant we could relax then you don’t know us very well.

But that’s another story.

Norman and Maica

It’s been a busy couple of weeks with a lot happening in my world – all of it good on a personal level, though I continue to regard the likelihood of the American republic surviving the next decade as minimal at best – and I’ll get to those stories by and by.  But today I’m going to tell this one.

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For their last full day on earth, the turkeys got sunshine and good weather.  This is fitting.  They were good birds.

I was not all that convinced that getting turkeys was a wise move, back in March.  We were already committed to chickens and even had chickens left from last year.  Chickens are not hard animals to care for – they’re about on par with cats, in some ways, and significantly easier and less troublesome to both owner and neighbors than dogs – but that seemed enough.  We got turkeys anyway.

They’re such sweet birds, amiably goofy and inquisitive.  They win you over.

Only two of the six survived to adulthood.  They’re a fragile breed, engineered for maximum meat and minimum anything else.  But we built a nice little run for them outside of the barn where they could wander, and as time went on we took to letting them have the run of the grassy area outside of the barn.  They got stronger, which actually helped them at the County Fair.  One of the judging criteria was how well they could walk, and Norman did a nice job of that.  He and Jamaica would cruise around the grass for as long as we let them.

But as noted they are fragile birds, and not really bred to last.  They get big and heavy, and they break down.  If we let them stay in the barn they’d be gone by January.  And Norman went to a local deli in the Fur and Feather Sale on the final weekend of the Fair.  There is only one way this could end.

Kim, Lauren, and I woke up at 6am today and drove out to the barn.  We let the turkeys out for a brief walk, and then herded them into their cages and drove over to the processor.  We said our goodbyes and went home.

It was hard.  It was really hard.  But that is what it means to raise livestock.  We knew that going in.

Last night all four of us stopped off for hot fudge sundaes at our local custard shop and went over to the barn.  We let Norman and Maica out onto the grass and we just hung out with them for an hour or so.  They marched around in that plodding way that turkeys have.  Maica was fascinated with her reflection in the side panel of the car.  If you sat down they’d come over and hang out with you.  Norman would try to eat your shirt.  Maica would try to eat your hair.  It turns out that turkeys like vanilla custard.

I think in my mind I will leave them there, wandering around on the grass with us.

They were good birds.

Final Notes on the Fair for This Year

Well, it’s over.

After ten days, innumerable judgings, more than a few meals designed to cut my lifespan into something more to my enemies’ liking, and only a couple of hot days, this year’s rendition of the 4H County Fair is in the books.  It’s been a long week and a half, and here are a few random stories, thoughts, and/or observations to wrap it all up.

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I am now officially Too Old to spend a week eating Fair food.  My favorite moderately-lethal place from last year, the one that sold Korean tacos that could, with some imagination, be considered not entirely unhealthy, was missing this year and I was left to sample the wares of the other places.  Those other places sold food that was tasty, yes indeed, but when it actually says on the menu, “Bucket o’ Nachos,” my guess is that it’s really designed for someone much younger than I.

My stomach let me know this, after a while.

First the midway, now the food court.  I tell you, the Fair is getting to be downright unwelcoming in some ways.

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But still quite welcoming in others.  One of the neat things about living in a place for a while – especially a place that I consider to be a small town, even if the locals get kind of annoyed when this comes up – is that you run into people you know.

There were friends old and new roaming around, and it was a pleasure to see them all.

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I seem to have lost my parking mojo this year, however.  Last year I could count on finding spaces within a block of the entrance, but this year I had to revert back to walking.

The Fairgrounds sit in the middle of a residential neighborhood, and parking is something of a premium on regular days.  Add in the Fair, and, well, it’s a good way to work off some of those nachos at least.

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The problem with a 4H Fair is that 4H kids tend to be the sort of involved, active kids who do things, which means of course that if you have multiple things that need to be done there is sure to be a conflict.

We discovered this on Saturday, when Lauren needed to be in two places at once.  Being married to a scientist, I know how difficult that task can be.

Since our club won the Drama Festival back in May, we were invited to perform here at the County Fair.  This is a fun thing to do, since it gives you a chance to show off for your family and friends, and it provides a nice tune-up for next week’s performance at the State Fair.

Lauren has a big role in the play, as one of the four exhibitors fabricating the titular Exceptional Excuse.

Unfortunately, this year she also entered Norman the Reserve Grand Champion Turkey (yes, that’s his title now and we’re going to milk that for all it’s worth, thank you) into the Fur and Feather Sale.

The Fur and Feather Sale is basically a community auction.  Kids walk by with posters for their animals rather than leading the poor beasts in through the throng (try that with a turkey sometime, go ahead), and people bid to buy the animals.  The prices are always inflated, because hey – it’s for the kids – and sometimes people donate the animals back to be re-auctioned for the scholarship fund.

There were 120 animals up for sale, more or less, which meant that Lauren could be up any time between 10am and 1pm.  Our Drama performance was scheduled for 11:15-11:30am.  Naturally, Lauren’s slot in the Fur and Feather Sale occurred exactly at 11:20.

Fortunately Tabitha moved up to take her role, and the audience forgave her taking the script up with her because that’s what last-minute understudies have to do.  Someone else stepped in to do Tabitha’s sound effects. And it all went off quite well.

Next week: the State Fair!

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People still glue quarters to the ground.

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Every day I must have walked past the local Republican Party booth a dozen times, and every day they ignored me.  This is probably for the best, as I already had my comeback ready.

Apparently sometime this past week Governor Teabagger (a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) went to my home town and butchered an attempt to order a cheesesteak.

First, he cut in line.  He did this in South Philly.  Security detail or no security detail, I’m still not sure how he managed to do that and make it out alive.

Second, he ordered it with American cheese.  That’s acceptable in other parts of the city, but in South Philly the only cheese is Whiz.  This is why I don’t order cheesesteaks there.  Someone should have clued him in.

And third, he left his trash for others to pick up.  Insert your own political analogy here.

This dimwitted sock puppet wants to be president?  He’s not even qualified to order lunch.

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I nearly got my garage back this afternoon.  We never did have the time to clean up the temporary chicken enclosures from when we washed them right before the fair, so I’ve been parking in the street.  This morning I decided now was the time, and for an hour or so I had the chance to park there.

Then it turned out that we were going to be bringing the chickens back here after the Fair to be washed again, which would save us setting up a quarantine enclosure over at the barn but meant that I had to lose my garage again.

It was worth the trade.

They’re there now, peacefully violating local ordinances, but they’ll be gone in the morning.

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The turkeys we took straight back to the barn tonight. They were so glad to be home.  Poor Norman would bash his face against the wires of his cage, and Maica would pace.  They weren't used to being confined like that, and the Fair is a noisy place even for people.  So now they're back where they belong, and they seemed as happy as turkeys could seem.

They’re really affectionate birds, especially around us.  I’m going to miss them.

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This was the year that Lauren really discovered the Fair.  Oh she knew all about it, and had spent a lot of time there before, but this year she would set her alarm and get up early to go over for breakfast, and she is old enough now that we can let her stay there until we get there, and then let her stay there after we leave.  She’s got friends there.  It’s a safe place.

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Tonight was load-out.  This is always something of a madhouse, with people lined up all over to retrieve projects, check out animals, and so on.

It went pretty well, all things considered.  The storm held off, everyone got home safely, and if we forgot a couple of claim checks, we can retrieve those projects later.

It's good to be home.

Judging the Animals at the Fair

There is something of a gradient of ownership at the Fair.

Over on the east side of the fairgrounds is the midway.  Any rube can walk through the midway and many of them do.  It’s a fun place, even if it is too loud and I’m too old.  There are games and prizes – it’s one of the few places on earth where you regularly see muscular tattooed men carrying large teddy bears – and right next to it is the food area where anyone with a few dollars and no concern for their long-term health can find tasty things to eat.  This is the public part of the Fair.

In the middle of the fairground is the big stage, which is open to everyone during the day but at night it closes down and you have to pay extra to get in.  They have a variety of musical acts that call to mind the evocative quote from The Blues Brothers (“We’ve got both kinds!  Country and Western!”) and every so often they get someone else who is running the county fair circuit to perform.  Once in a while they score and book someone who hits the big time right before the Fair – one year they had a band named for a political division somewhere in the south and the closest parking spot that night was somewhere in Indiana.  So the middle is a mixed place.  It’s public, but restricted.

Further west come the small animals – the rabbits, the poultry, and so on.  You get some of the crowd in there, of course, but mostly this belongs to the kids who have raised those animals and are now showing them off.

And then come the big animals – dairy, beef, pigs, sheep, and so on.  Goats if you’re inclined to put them up in this category.  Mostly the people you see here are the kids and their families and friends.  Not as many other people wander this far over.

So far we’ve made it to the third level, with the small animals.  This is where you feel you own the Fair – it’s yours, and everyone else is just visiting.  Lauren keeps encouraging us to take the next step to level four, which would involve owning some kind of hoofed mammal, but we’ve successfully resisted her entreaties to this point.

She remains optimistic, however.

Lauren is the animal exhibitor in our household.  Tabitha used to do cats, but our cats finally had enough of that and she had to stop.  So we’re in for rabbits, chickens, and – new this year – turkeys, and that’s quite enough really.

Rabbit judging was yesterday.

The first step with rabbits is showmanship, where the goal is to demonstrate to a judge that you actually do know a thing or two about your animal.  There’s a whole ritual involved – you pose the animal, flip it around, point out every small feature on it as if you are some kind of tour guide for fleas looking for a new home, and answer questions as they arise.

You also wait a lot, since that is a prerequisite for just about anything.

Lauren has moved up a class to Intermediate, which meant that her Showmanship wasn’t until after lunch.  Not that this kept her from coming in early – she still had poultry to take care of, and it was Wristband Day after all – but she spent much of her morning grooming Maybelline and getting ready for her audience with the judge.

It went well.  She ended up scoring 96/100 on the exam, which is a solid Blue ribbon in anyone’s book.

There was then a long interval of midway rides, since that is the whole point of Wristband Day.  Lauren took off with her friends and Tabitha took off with hers and Kim and I just went home since we are not the target audience for those rides anyway.  It’s nice that they are old enough to roam the Fair on their own now.

Rabbit judging starts at 5pm and goes until the next Mayan apocalypse.  They close down the Rabbit Barn so that even the parents cannot get in – a new feature this year which was inconvenient but which, in hindsight and as a teacher, I can understand.  Kim and I hadn’t planned to be back until around 6 or 6:30, but Lauren called so we came by and stood outside the building and talked to her through the screen until she just told us to go away, after which we wandered around the fair for a while.  Eventually we found our way back to the Stock Pavilion, where the judging takes place, and we waited.

It’s probably good for the kids that the judges are thorough and take the time to explain things to them.  The audience grows ever older and more infirm, but the 4Hers do well out of it so really how much can you complain?  Lauren’s rabbit class didn’t come up until nearly 7:30, and didn’t finish until after 8.


She had the same judge as her showmanship.

Maybelline ended up scoring a Blue ribbon, which is precisely the sweet spot between being disappointed (Red) and having to stick around for another two or three rounds of judging (Top Blue) when there is still fun to be wrung out of Wristband Day.

Today began far too early, because poultry waits for no man, woman, or child.

Poultry is a bit more free-form than rabbits, in that showmanship happens whenever the kids wander over to the judge rather than on a schedule and the actual judging is rather more fluid, but it all goes well even so.  There are a lot more birds than rabbits, in a lot more categories, so you do what you have to in order to make it work.

Turkeys came first.

This is Lauren’s first year with turkeys, so we didn’t quite know what to expect.  It turns out that from the exhibitor’s perspective turkey judging is the easiest animal in the Fair.  They don’t even have to be taken out of their cages (which is good when you’re talking about a 35lb bird) – the judge just walks among them, examining them, grabbing them now and then, once in a while setting them free to roam to see how they move.  Easy.

Our Fair recognizes four categories of turkey – white and bronze, tom and hen.  Lauren’s birds are bronze, and she had one of each – a tom and a hen.

Norman was judged first of the two.  We were worried about his tail feathers, since Maica had been worrying them for weeks, but it turned out that must be quite common since his tail looked better than almost every other turkey there.  So win for Norman.  There were a lot of bronze toms, and in the end Norman came out as the Top Blue – the best bronze tom at the Fair!

The judge was particularly impressed with his musculature – he said that it was clear he had a lot of room to walk around and his legs looked good – and with his eagerness to puff up and display himself, which the judge said was a sign that Norman had been played with a lot.  This in fact was true.  He’s been a well-taken-care-of bird.

Maica also did well, scoring a Blue.  She might have done better if she had been willing to walk for the judge, but every time she came out of the cage she stopped pacing immediately and sat down.  Oh well.  That’s what happens with animals – they do what they do.  The judge later told us that she wouldn’t have gotten Top Blue anyway, since she’s a bit on the narrow side, but that she was a very good looking bird who had obviously been cared for very well.  That was nice to hear.

Eventually it came down to the four Top Blues, and Norman came out as the Reserve Grand Champion turkey.  For those of you who are Fair-impaired, this means he was the second-best turkey of all of them, and that’s quite an achievement for a first-year turkey exhibitor.

Congratulations, Lauren!

Then it was time for chickens.  I missed most of this, unfortunately, since I had to run back to Home Campus and give a final exam to my summer class.  I didn’t want to be there, the students didn’t want to be there, and yet there we were. 

I did get to see Lauren show her first chicken – the Sultan pullet she named Santana, who scored a Red.

I missed the Buff Orpington cockerel (Simon, who got a Red also), the Buff Orpington pullet (Pumpkin, who scored a Blue), the Faverolle cockerel (Rhett, another Blue) and the Faverolle pullet (Mocha, who not only got a Blue but was declared to be the Top Bird in her group, so we’re going to call that a Top Blue and leave it at that).

I got back in time to see Lauren’s chicken showmanship, though, which went well (another Blue!).  She had the same judge as the turkeys that morning.

All in all, a successful day at the Fair.

The animals are now done until the Fur and Feather Sale on Saturday.  Tomorrow will just be barn duty, general fair-going, and perhaps something of a break.  Or not.  We’ll see.