Home From the Fair

Five years ago Vicktory Farm & Gardens was invited to supply a display of turkeys for the Puyallup Fair’s Animals of the World barn on its last five days. 

The Puyallup Fair, officially the Western Washington Fair, is the single largest annual event in Washington state and one of the top ten fairs world wide!

We’re always glad to be a part of making fair-goers glad they came, whether it has been in our girls’ 4-H years or now as participants in the Animals of the World Barn.

We arrive on Wednesday morning, with turkeys, quail, pens, signs, and lots of extras.  We unload, (one of these days I’m going to have someone there just to take pictures of us unloading and setting up our display) It doesn’t take us long to set up and we start receiving public into the barn by ten.

For the most part, after ten o’clock this year, I was just putting up the last of the educational signage and the finishing touches on decorations.  I often think first day is the hardest day, by about three o’clock I feel like I’ve already been there for two days, but ten o’clock finally comes, we shut down the barn and go out to the trailer for giggles, unwinding and a fairly decent night’s sleep all things considered.

We stay at the fair for five days. If we shower, we do it in a baby phone booth (that’s the size of the shower in our trailer), our food tries to resemble real food but often we give up and in to less than healthy living, and more coffee than is good for ten people is consumed by one. Up at six in the trailer out in the parking lot, into the barn to clean up, fluff up the shavings, ready to receive the public by ten a.m. telling them all about quail and turkeys and eggs and our farm, until ten o’clock at night, eleven on Friday and Saturday nights, and then back out to the trailer for a quick giggle about the day with the crew, unwind and then to bed. 

Sometimes it seems like we’re there for a month, then I get home and see the farm and try to make my body work and I know I’ve been gone for a month!  A five day long month!

We love to do it though, can’t think of anything outside of living and working here at the farm that I love as much as the fair.  I can skip a year of clam diggin’, postpone huckleberries, but miss the fair?  Never!  And now it factors even more into our lives, we’ll talk about why next time, and I show you pictures of Bet smoochin’ on Stanley later in the week as well. 

But for now I’ve gotta try and turn my body clock back around to normal!