Festival in Independrnce MO

Today we drove to Independence MO where they were having their annual fall festival. We have been to many festivals and this one has to been the largest one for a town fall festival. Everyone and their brother was wanting to get in on the money making by charging $5 to park. The cub scouts had several businesses and homes close to downtown that they parked cars on the properties.

We chose to donate to the scouts over all the other organizations that were charging to park. The scouts is one of my favorite clubs, and I remember being a scout, and being a leader when our kids were in the scouts.

The festival had a lot of vendors selling their goods at outrageous prices. There were all the politicians and political groups with canopies set up, several scout troops were selling food, some of the local restaurants had boots set up also. We saw one line of people waiting to get a hot dog from one troop, and when we saw $1 hot dogs we knew why the line was so long there. The businesses had $2 dogs or $4 burgers, up to $9 steak sandwiches.

Most of the vendors were ripping everyone off with $1.50 - $3 bottles of water, or cokes, so I was shocked to see one of the local churches giving away ice cold bottles of water, and a few of the scouts selling $1 bottles of water and cokes. You can buy 24 bottles of water for $4, so at $1 they were making $20 off a case of water, less the cost of the ice, so why do theses vendors want to charge $2-$4 for a bottle of water? and cokes is about the same.

I walked all around the festival looking at the wares, watching the people, and wandering why I wasted my time going to these things. I guess I just enjoy looking at some of the crafts, and displays they offer. I rarely buy anything, because I can't stand people taking advantage of people.

One neat thing we saw was a guy selling $5 chances at winning a pocket cruiser, (small motorcycle). He had a gazebo type tent set up with a bicycle sitting there, and all you had to do was ride the bicycle about 10 feet to the other side of the gazebo, and the catch was the bike. It was a normal bike except for the handlebars. If you turned the handlebars to the left, the wheel went to the right, and if you turned the bars to the right the wheel went left. We watched several teenagers wipe out before they could get even 2 feet. Just stop and think about how hard that would really be!

After we had seen all we wanted to we headed back to Kearney. we stopped on the way and bought a meat lovers pizza from Little Caesars. (hard to beat an $8 large pizza) Once we got back to the motel Marcia went to wash our clothes and I tried to take a nap. The maid was cleaning our room as we arrived and she had turned the AC on high so the room was like an icebox.

Tomorrow we are thinking about going to a car show, we enjoy seeing some of the old cars.......