Like most county fairs, ours has what you might expect: kettle corn, live music, vendor booths, 4H stuff, arts and crafts competitions, pony rides, and what have you. So when I went to our county fair I was expecting the same old thing that I see at most festivals. But before we even entered the fairgrounds I noticed that they had several tractors set up at the entrance. "Of course!" I thought, "Tractors!" We do live in a farming community. So a couple tractors at the fair is to be expected. But they didn't just have a couple. They had twelve. Plus a few more just inside the gates. And another dozen inside the vendor area.
Now, I'm not going to bring up the differences between Southern California and rural Oregon too many times, I promise. But you have to understand I'm having all these new experiences and my first instinct it to compare the two areas. I have been having these sort of "that would NEVER happen in California" experiences five or six times a day these last few weeks. I'm adjusting. It's to be expected, right?
So seeing all the tractors was one of those small moments. The other moments? They filled the sand box with unsprouted corn seed. And they put a sticker of a sherriff's badge on every single child at the entrance gate. And the kid's entertainment included events like tractor pulls and gun slinging (which I'll get to later). And they didn't charge for the bounce-house or the toddler car racing area or the petting zoo or even the pony rides! Seriously, everything in the family section was free. And since we went on the free-admission day, the whole thing was free!
Of course we went back the following day and did it all over again!
But, back to the gun slinging stage event. This guy Dan (who happens to be the world champion gun slinger, dontchaknow) was doing his thing slinging guns (while offering gun advice and safety instruction) and had some tricks that he did with his horse too. But when he asked for volunteers and set an eight year old up on stage with a 12 inch foam stick in his mouth and then snapped off inch long pieces of the stick one at a time by cracking it with his bull whip, well, I was pretty impressed. I was also thinking, "Even if he never hit a single child, that guy would be totally sued in California!" Seriously, he was cracking that whip within inches of this kid's face!
Later in the show his wife mounted a spinning wheel and he threw knives at her, landing them all in the wood around her head and body. (It wasn't a trick, I saw the knives flying through the air.) Pretty exciting stuff, I tell you.
Needless to say, we had an awesome time.
