The Common Ground Country Fair

In recent years we've left on Friday afternoons.  "Vanny" makes the two hour trip up to Unity filled with our kids and friends and a pizza from our favorite country store.  Just after dark, they open the special gate for vendor vehichles and we manuver around Caldwell's organic beef tent, past the Tuva bakery stand and park right behind the Beans, Cider and Switchel booth.  We take in the run down, the low down and the sleepingbag down (that's what the kiddos are huddled in) and begin our routine of making Baked beans for Saturday's Fair goers.  It is fun and rewarding, not to mention nice smelling, but selfishly we like it most because it allows us to make our own coffee (which in the past was contraband) and avoid the epic traffic jam that is the Common Ground Fair.

This year we had a Saturday wedding in the family (Beautiful!) so we couldn't make it up until Sunday.  For details on the fair, you should check out some of the blogosphere's Maine bloggers' post from this year and year's past.  For us it is a true ritual...one that has grown from my own childhood days vending food at this fair.  A ritual that has grown into including my college boyfriend, now husband.  That has grown into a touchstone of my first daughter's birthday celebration to the extent that she was devestated that we could not sleep over this year.  And.... for now, has converted from us taking in homesteading lectures and political action talks and meeting up with friends to us spending hours in the Children's Area watching sweet puppet shows and jumping in hay. 



How one thing, that remains mostly the same, can be experienced in so many different and increasingly wonderful ways over 30 years.  Thank you MOFGA. 



The forest walk from Parking has hundreds of signs to practice reading

 



Whomever invented Cardboard sleds should be Knighted!