Sunday was the big Apple Fest, heralded as the biggest festival to hit Strafford since, well, the last Apple Fest. We hoped to see lots of vendors and pocket some swag, cider, cheese and other stuff to take home.
We got there, and managed to find a parking space near the main event, the Joseph Smith Morrill State Historic Site house. It looked familiar, we’d been here four years ago on our trip up with Jeremy. First stop, the admissions table. $15 bucks a pop seemed a bit much, considering that it looked like a block party flea market rather than a world-famous Apple Festival. Nevertheless, before Mom could take over and whip out her wallet, I unhipped the old MasterCard.
“Sorry, we don’t take cards. Cash only.”
Of course, between the three of us, we had about 17 dollars in cash. I went back to the truck and emptied out the coin console and the emergency stash I kept in the visor pocket. Now we had about $28. It would have to do. We paid, got our hands stamped (really? Ya got a lot of re-entries?) and wandered up the hill. Oh yeah, I almost forgot the ‘price includes lunch and dessert’ feature. We clutched our paper cups. Somehow, the idea of a “lunch included” that would fit in a 10 ounce paper cup didn’t seem like we were getting the better end of the deal. We weren’t. The lunch line was comprised of about a dozen middle aged ladies, escapees no doubt from the Elementary School Lunch Ladies State Home for the Confused, each armed with a ladle and a crock pot. We are not impressed.
The whole thing was haphazard. Three or four picnic tables set up with a few toothpicks worth of cheese, a face painting, and cider taste testing. Nothing to buy here, move along folks. Not one of the vendors or farms advertising their wares had thought to bring some of the wares with them. They expected you to taste the tease on a toothpick, and then drive the 73 miles to their farm stand to actually buy the stuff. Not bloody likely, as Michael Caine would say. We wandered the grounds for a few more minutes, and then, disgustedly, headed home.
We left for home on Monday, and apart from a quickie rest stop somewhere south of Lake George on I-87, the southbound trip was uneventful.