Goin' up the Country

Everyone had Wednesday off and Thursday and Friday were looking poorly. So it took a little while, but we finally decided to go to the Dutchess Co. fair.
  It’s an hour and a half trip, and we didn’t tell the girls where we were going. We just said bring ten dollars of your own money, go to the bathroom and get in the car. They bought their games and for the first forty-five minutes of the trip they were good and quiet. Somewhere around Fishkill they started acting up. It was time for a pit-stop. Loyal readers will shutter at the mention of the name Pit-stop.
  Teri loves the Cracker Barrel, so we stopped in there to use the bathroom and to stretch our legs. Both girls wanted to spend their money on a claw hand that grips things and looked real cool. I told them no and said to Elena that she would thank me later. After prying them away from the toys several times I went outside and left it up to their mother.

A few moments later they get into the car empty handed and off we go up route 9. Past the lovely city of Poughkeepsie and the garden like Culinary Institute, we arrive at the town of Hyde Park, home to President Roosevelt. We slide past his home and a little while later we follow a sign for fair parking.

The girls didn’t see the sign and their first inkling of what we were doing was when they saw this ride towering above the tree line. It was a ride that swung in a giant loop high above the fair, more about that later. Suddenly the girls are all happy and excited and listening to us. We park and walk into the fair grounds for a reasonable 15 dollars per person over twelve, plus $5.00 parking. We walk into the middle of the midway, Teri and I are hungry and the girls are no longer thinking about food, just rides and that monster that towers over the fair grounds, whose name I’ve forgotten. We bought twenty dollars worth of tickets, about twenty –four tickets.

They run directly for the big whirly thing, which turns out to be from France. At eight tickets per ride they must have been trying to get their money back for the statue of liberty. Teri explains how many tickets that will require. To add to it I take away the sixteen tickets it will cost. It left eight, they decide to look around. At every ride the girls are told to choose carefully because once they are gone, they are gone. They end up going on three rides and we then start to wander around the fair. We are looking for the animal barns and are having trouble finding them. When I think I know where we are everything moves. We get a good tour of the fair and Teri and I eat so fair gumbo and the girls eat some chicken and fries, we have had better. We find the bans a little after dark (we left at 2:30 got to the fair around 4:30; it’s now about 7:45.) I feel the wind start to pick up and the clouds in the west are coming if fast I point this out to Teri and say we should go because it looks like a bad storm is coming. Teri wasn’t concerned and it was a good thing we didn’t leave because the best was yet to come. We found the Dutchess County hunt clubs animal exhibit. It was filled with live animals. Alligators, bobcats, monkeys, tigers and with some of them you could get your picture with them. The girls got their picture taken with a fennec fox, it’s got big ears and they both fell in love with it. After that they got to pet cows, goats and sheep before we left to find the horses, which we could not pet because they might bit. The girls were impressed with the weight and the size of the horses. After the horses we watched pig races and then found another petting zoo.

Now you would thing the girls were angels the whole evening. Well I saved all the fun for the end. After eating the girls each had ten bucks burning a hole in their pocket and they decided that they wanted to play games with it. They were warned to choose wisely. They sat down at several water games and a couple of games to throw darts at balloons near the end of their wad of cash they did start to look at the prices of the games and to choose a little wiser. They won a fish because the fish game guy let Elena win a fish after her sister won. Once out of money the phrase ‘do you have any money?’ was uttered a few times.

At the end of the night we all had a snack of ice cream for me, an Icee for each of the girls, and then Teri asks if I want to try fried Oreo cookies? I of course say yes. They were amazingly good. The outside was soft and crispy and the cookie was soft and sweet, really good.

We leave the fair at 10:30, the GPS takes us north to the Kingston-Rheincliff bridge in the opposite direction of all the traffic. I thought it was a mistake, but then I thought about the traffic and kept going. We stopped at a rest stop around 11:30 and got something to eat and drink. We got home around 12:30, my head hit the pillow around 1am and sleep finally hit after 1:30. All in all a very good day, a much needed family time.