I went to the Altamont Fair the other day. I’ve been many times, but may have skipped it last year. I went alone, but had a lot of fun!
The rides were incredible. They seem to have contracted with a new amusement company and there were more, better and newer rides than I have seen before.
I wanted to go on all of them, but chickened out since I knew it would give me motion sickness. I spent some time watching them though, and did ride the Ferris wheel and two ghost houses:
They were silly and not scary, but gave me a chuckle 🙂
Those are two of the winning scarecrows in the scarecrow contest. The theme was ‘music’. Can you guess who they are?
Admission to the fair included the circus, which was entertaining and surprisingly long (over an hour). I saw trapeze artistes, a globe of death, many jugglers, performing horses, and this guy ‘The Master Of Balance’. That’s a tower of about ten chairs he had made, and from my great seat he looked to be quite nervous.
It was a very hot day and inside the circus tent was almost 100F! I imagine my body temperature rose to life-threatening levels as I watched the extremely cute hula hoop girl 😉
I’m sure you already recognized him, but this remarkably lifelike statue is of Phineas Barnum and stands in the circus museum. I spent quite some time reading the historical material on display.
Cute birds! The chick in the yellow dress was only a week old! I felt bad for the livestock since even the abundant fans did little to alleviate the heat.
Speaking of livestock the goat dress-up contest was very amusing. My favourite was this pair (‘the twins’). Note the little goat shoes!
Topical art, in the ‘under 8’ category. This is Slimer from Ghostbusters, and is indeed a terrifying portrayal!
Last but not least I watched a fascinating sheep-shearing demonstration.
The guy doing the cutting used hand shears and hand-cranked as you can see above. He went into near academic detail about the process and I learned so much I now believe it’s fair to call me a sheep-shearing expert myself. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments 😉
Are you now a ringer with your new shearing knowledge?
Did the shears go click, click, click?
And did that old snagger pictured have a bare-bellied yoe?
Well I did learn that in some ways the world of that song is a farce, since speed counts only about 20% toward what makes a good shearer. The snagger can blow through that yoe faster than me any day, but I guarantee I’ll produce better fleece than what comes off his blue-belly since precision and care for the sheep are more my forte 😉
Oh, and I was surprised to learn lanolin is about 50% of the weight of a fleece.
And that in the early days of dentistry the patient had to use a foot-crank to turn the drill the dentist was using in his mouth. If he ever stopped cranking, the drill could get caught in his tooth (or even worse chip it)! Yikes…
Madge and Kitty Purry.