Country Boy at the Country Fair

The Oregon Country Fair is quite a scene. It is about 25 minutes west of Eugene in a heavily wooded area. I need to preface this with the fact that I have never been to this country fair before. When looking at the information on line the one thing that I wanted to check out was their nudity rules. Here's what the web site said,

"Is nudity allowed at the Fair?
In accordance with Oregon law, people are required to cover their genitals in public."

I can deal with that. I knew there would be various levels of undress but hey, it's Oregon. It's nothing I or my kids haven't seen before. My nephew William....that's another story.

William is a 13 year old boy from Georgia. As they say in Georgia, "Georgia born, Georgia bred and when I die I'll be Georgia dead." He is, for all intents and purposes, a country boy, especially by Oregon standards. I knew that this fair would be something he's never done before and probably will never do again. It is 2 and a half hours away but I felt like it was worth the trip for the experience.

We went to the fair on the opening day and arrived in the parking lot at 10:20. The gates were to open at 11:00. It was really fun. From the moment we entered the parking lot everyone kept saying, "Happy fair!" Like it was a national holiday. The 3 boys and I lucked out and got a ride right to the front gate! As we rode along it was the same, "Happy fair!" Almost everyone was in a costume of some sort. There were lots of tutu wearing dudes along the way. This took William by surprise. It's at about this point when William started saying, "Well then." It was like a guys way of saying, "Oh my." As we pulled into a parking spot up front we could hear a drum circle and lots of whoop whoops and yeeeeeawwws.( Oh, and here's the cool truck we saw too.)
When we turned the corner we could see all the commotion. What fun!

The stilt walkers were so cool.  They were dancing around, banging on bells and drums.  My boys were in their element.  William felt like he was on another planet.  Then some guys covered in mud wearing grass clothing, yes, I said grass clothing came around the corner.  I heard another, "Well then."  Next the green people came running through.  "Well then." And finally some very scantily clad folks.  They were wearing loin cloths...that's it. "WELL THEN."

We walked toward the front gate and got ready to go in.  Again, more of the same.  From the fair people, "HAPPY FAIR!"  From William, "WELL THEN."  There were about 1000 people waiting to go in and we were in the front of the pack.  As we entered it was a wonderland of country fair.  It looked like a human size fairyland.  All the structures were as organic as they could be.  Most of them were made from whatever was in the forest.  As we walked along we checked out all the booths.  Here's a little sample of some of the music at the fair.     There was lots of pottery, tie dye, fairy wings, devil horns, shrines, capes, more tie dye, pottery, music, and the like. There were a few guys that were giving out free hugs, even one mostly naked guy. William said, after the guy walked by that he should have gotten a hug. Yeah, right.

About 30 minutes in there was a parade.  I am pretty sure this parade went on all day just going in circles while picking up new people and dropping some off.  It was an never ending, constantly evolving parade. "Well then." 

We walked around for a total of 4 hours.  My boys bought horns and capes.  They needed some good fair regalia.  William didn't see much that interested him except the fudge.  That looked good.  We saw shrines of all types, LOTS of topless women.  It was fun pointing them all out to William.  He got embarrassed every time. It never got old.  There was a dragon that was about 50 feet long and 8 feet high built out of twigs.  There were 30 people sitting inside eating their lunch. We joined them.  There was a special bench for stilt walkers.  The bench was about 6 feet in the air.  We saw the parade again.  We spent some time at the main stage watching people dance and sing.  There were a couple, "Well then's" there for sure.  

A funny little parade that we saw was about 5 large noses and a box of Kleenex.  The noses were on stilts and as they made their way through the crowd they'd stop and say, "I feel an attack coming." or some thing like that and then throw a weighted green bag out of a nostril.  It was really funny....and gross.  

As we approached the exit we saw the naked "free hugs" guy again.  What luck!  And William said he wanted one.  I said, "Now's your chance Will."  He smirked and said, "Ah, no thanks."  That's what I thought.  We made our way out and headed to the car.  There were HUNDREDS of people walking in as we were walking out.  It was very busy while we were there, I can't imagine how busy it was going to be with all those added people. 

We made it back to the car.  All 3 boys were complaining that their feet hurt.  I'm 47, how is it that their feet hurt more than mine?  We turned on the AC and headed out.  We were dusty, dirty and tired.  I knew those boys didn't particularly care about quality fair food so I opted for Subway on the way home.  They were all happy about that.  It was a fun, and definately memorable day!

A few more pix.