My "Redneck Day"

Today is Labor Day. The traditional "end of summer", also, the traditional last day of the Fonda Fair. The weather was amazing--a great day to go to a fair. While I was getting ready to leave for the fair, I entertained the thought of leaving my camera home. We were just going to go to the Demolition Derby and I thought I wouldn't be interested in using the camera. At the last minute I decided to take my point and shoot. Whew--good decision. I ultimately shot about 120 images--just a few more than the "one a day" that I determined to shoot and post each day. I chose about 30 that I wanted to post to this blog entry, but I thought that would be too many. So don't worry, you won't have to slog through that many.

Before beginning, a couple of trivia questions:
1) What's the difference between 1600 asa on an DSLR camera and a digital point and shoot?
ANS: a looooooot of digital grain.
2) Where can you get REAL Italian Ice in upstate NY?
ANS: At a small booth at the Fonda Fair, or at Polar Freeze in Amsterdam.

There was a horse competition while we were there. They were decked out beautifully. This is just one of the many I took.

The horses themselves were beautiful and I love taking detail shots of them and their gear.

The tails of these show horses were intrigingly braided. I was able to get these shots when they were back in the stalls.

I noticed this grungy trailer out behind the barns and was going to photograph it, when I noticed that it was from Maine. It seems like a long way to come just to attend the Fonda Fair, but then I realized that these 'horse folks' must make a circuit of Fairs.

I grabbed a few shots of the fair itself.

Here's the Italian Ice... I haven't had the REAL thing for years and years. In New York, where I grew up, you could get it almost anywhere. I'm hooked. Polar Freeze will see a lot of me in the time left before it closes for the winter.

So now for the Demolition Derby. I have to laugh when I think about how much I enjoy attending one of these "redneck" events. You have to search far and wide (in the grandstand) to hear even one whole sentence spoken in proper English and the words "dressed nicely" and "demolition derby" in the same sentence are an oxymoron. But it's a hoot. I want to be a demolition derby driver...

This year is the first year that they've had a heat with mini-vans. There was one female driver, and lo and behold, she won. Whooie, girls rule!!!!

This is the van that won.

There was a heat with school buses--earlier in the day, before we got there, there had been more in the derby, but when we were there, only two competed. Talk about laborious.

On the way to our car at the end of the day, we passed this "Bug". I love them. Since I'll probably never own one personally, I get a kick out of taking photos of them.

So it was a good "redneck" day.