Aug. 5: Quilt Gardens + Ohio State Fair

Bob and I are at this campground east of Columbus, Ohio. We are under tall trees and fireflies are flickering about. That's idyllic but the sounds aren't. Across a little creek from us, the campground is playing a very noisy movie in an outdoor pavillion. Most of you know how hard of hearing I am, and I can hear all of it clearly. Shouldn't a campground sound of babbling brooks and meadowlarks?

This morning we were in Indiana in Amish country. We understand that the Amish don't own phones although they don't see it a sin to use them, just to own them. We saw a young man driving one of the buggies and texting. Either he was Mennonite, not Amish, or he was sinning! It gave us a laugh. It's neat to see that businesses have hitching posts right along with parking spaces for vehicles. Friday must be wash day for the Amish as farm after farm had wash on the line.

I read somewhere that since Amish women cannot express their individuality through their clothing, they do it through their gardening. That seems quite true as the floral beds on the Amish farms are stunning.

I was going to include many more photos from Amish country in this entry, but unfortunately photos are uploading very slowly on this campground connection so I've omitted many.

The county we were in has quilt gardens at various spots where the flowers make a quilt block. Perhaps you can recognize the pattern of this one. One of the problems with them was that they weren't built up into slanted beds and they didn't have viewing stands to get a good view. A few of them had signs that said, "Mother Nature has damaged this bed." It was fun driving to the various locations to see them. There were also quilt blocks painted on sides of buildings and those were listed on the same map so we saw many of them.

The state park this one was in was incredible ... a working flour mill, a fishing pond, and floral beds maintained by the local garden club. The floral beds had a section that was all dahlias from ones that had flowers two inches across to ones that were a foot across. All were stunning.

We stopped at Yoder's Store in Shipshewana which has everything from hardware to groceries to clothing to quilt fabrics. Its brochure says they have 12,000 bolts. I don't think they were all out, but there certainly were thousands. Jocelyn, they had Scrabble fabric! I was so excited.

And then we drove over to Columbus, Ohio for the Ohio State Fair. Had my uploads been faster, I would have included a photo of the sand castle that represented the fair and I would have included a photo of their synchronized tractor show. Yes, folks, they had six old tractors doing synchronized formations and it drew quite a crowd.

They had a junior competition for decorating toilets. Here's the blue ribbon winner.

The fair had a life-sized cow and calf sculpted out of butter. One of the signs listed the sculptors and one was a Bob King.

The sign mentioning Bob King amused me, but another sign horrified me. Read this:

Just how do they recycle it? Do they serve it to their students?

Not only did they have the butter cow and calf, they had a chocolate pig and piglets made from 500 pounds of chocolate. Fairs tend to bring out oddities.

There were some different foods at this fair and we limited ourselves to trying one, the deep fried buckeyes. Buckeyes, for those of you who don't make them at Christmas, are peanut butter and icing sugar centers covered in chocolate. The roast beef sundae sounds weird but we figured if you took the cherry off the top, it would be shepherd's pie in a cup.

There were some beautiful quilts at this fair. A most beautiful and poignant one was one that a woman had made to commemorate her mother who had Alzheimers. Her mother had loved art and loved to paint so the quilt had images of her mother's art plus art she loved.

The fair had so much more. There were civil war re-enactors who even included Abe Lincoln and there were not one but two HO model train
displays. We didn't run out of things to see and do.