Welcome back!
I know. Late as usual. Well, this year we did not go. The nieces did but we did not. Too many problems for us to go. But I have been there before. In fact, I worked at the carnivals when I was young and stupid. The main thing about those places is that you can smell the diesel fuel all over the place. Stupid as this may sound, I loved that about it. All the sounds, sights, music, smells. All of it was really special to me….then. Now, it would be more of a nightmare since I do not walk well. But it was so much fun then.
I do not want to romanticize that type of life. It was really difficult and would be even more dangerous now than it was then. But I did this in the 60s when some people still regarded themselves as being kind. Now, it is very difficult to find such people in that line of work. But, like Sophia Petrillo (Golden Girls for the uninitiated), I am going to ask you to….picture this. Carnivals: 1960s. I was driving my Honda motorcycle then down the midway…just because I could. No, not during the time it was open. Before we had set up everything. Lots of rides were halfway up. The games were already set up since they don’t take as long. All sorts of people running around there in funny shirts and strange looking hats. The cook tent was the first thing to be operational.
One of the things I loved about the food was the…..don’t choke on your coffee now….fried baloney sandwiches. Those things were awesome. So good. Funnel cakes were pretty good too. I used to work in the cotton candy tent. That was fun. People have no idea how much sugar they are choking down with that stuff. The whole thing is pure sugar spun out. Foot long hot dogs are 9 inches long.
The games do not have to be actually rigged to keep people from winning. The games are just pretty hard to do. You have to practice. Some of the ones with sort of a betting thing going on? Don’t bother. You will NOT win. The rest are win-able just not very often. Sometimes, it is the judgment of the person in the game. If it is, you lose. Period. But it is still fun if you go out there to have a good time. If you go out there to challenge everyone for the bear or the stuffed toy, you will go home usually unhappy. One guy did get the big stuffed toy but he had the police out there and saying someone ripped him off. Not true but that’s what he said. In that particular place, the police believed him. Uh huh.
We did go to some places I would not go back to if I was paid. There was a city that would NOT allow us, who worked with the carnival, to shower at the fairgrounds. That particular place then had problems with the “dirty carnies”. Yeah. That was good. Ah well. It was one place out of so many others. All in all, I had a good time then. But today, I would not go through that again if you paid me to do so. I am older and hopefully wiser.
The fair is still a fun place to go. I love the county fairs and the state fairs. That will never change.
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