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thinking I would pass this year. My thought process was this...

1. I don't like crowds. As a free festival--the first of the year--and something to do in an area where there's not a ton to do, it's usually pretty crowded.

2. I've reached the point where there's not a lot of fair food I like. At least none I'm willing to pay a lot of money for...once upon a time, $5 would get you something substantial like a gyro or a footlong corndog or steak-on-a stick, plus something to drink. Now even my beloved cheese on a stick (Swiss--no other cheese will do) is $7 😲 Now I admit, if they ever invented a single food that tasted exactly like all the yummy fair food smells combined (french fries, gyro, steak-on-a-stick, pizza, onion rings, fried veggies. etc.), I'd probably pay any amount for that <g>.

3. I'm too cheap to pay $10 to park at a FREE festival. Therefore...

4. I wind up parking a half mile away at one of the stores in town and hiking up a pretty steep hill to get to the festival. Usually I consider that my penance for all the junk food I'm about to consume.

All that being said, I wound up at the Maple Festival yesterday anyways <g>. The main reason I decided to go was it was the 100th anniversary of the festival, which began in 1926, and I didn't want to miss out on any fun acknowledgements of the milestone. It was only later I found out that they're not considering this the 100th anniversary because there were five years--mostly the COVID years--when there was no festival. This was festival #95, so no fanfare.

Thinking ahead, I decided to grab a drink from Dollar Tree before heading up the hill. I tried, for the first time, their Front Porch brand lemonade. It was well named; it tasted like lemons, sugar...and the water that ran off that front porch after you rinsed it off with the garden hose. Blech.

At the fair, I fought through a bigger than usual crowd and wound up eschewing all of the festival's potential dinner options in favor of a $5 bowl of mac and cheese with maple bacon from one of the nicer restaurants on the square (where the festival was being held). It was...adequate. Could've been cheesier. Later, for dessert, I had the traditional maple stir (I've shared this video here before but... ). I'm old enough to remember when a stir only cost a quarter. It's now $2...and I still almost always burn my tongue on the first bite because I'm impatient.

Overall, I wish I'd skipped the festival this year as planned. The most interesting thing to me was what happened when I first arrived. As I crested the hill, huffing and puffing, I saw the church on the corner of the square was giving out free bottles of water. Dang...could've saved myself $1.25 and the taste of dirt in my mouth. As soon as I got into the square proper, my ears were assaulted by a trio from a different church; two were carrying the usual "repent!" signs while the third was shouting into a bullhorn that was magnified to be even louder than the standard bullhorns. At one point, they walked right by me and I thought my ear drum might burst :-( Now I'm a Christian and generally support spreading the word of God but not only were these folks ruining everyone's hearing, they were foregoing the usual messages of God loves you and God is for you in favor of doom and gloom. I tuned them out when they got to the part about "your enemies want to eat your children!". Hmm...don't remember reading that in my Bible. Later it made me wonder who was more effectively spreading the love of God: the folks quietly handing out free water (and tracts if you wanted one) or the folks marching through the throngs deafening everyone with their negativity?