New Hampshire, the Sandwich Fair

Sandwich, New Hampshire is a quintessential New England counrty town nestled between The Lakes Region and the White Mountains. The town itself is charming and quaint with one blinking yellow traffic light, a post office, a general store, a library, a big white church, and that's practically it. We were fortunate enough to be there over Columbus Day weekend for the yearly Sandwich Fair and Parade. My uncle volunteers at the fair every year, so while he was busy keeping watch over the grade-school art projects we strolled the art and craft exhibits, the 4-H winners, and kept warm with a big steaming bowl of clam chowder. And of course, we didn't leave without sampling the fried dough drenched in a maple glaze. Wow.

 

The following day was the Sandwich Parade which toured the main few blocks of the downtown buildings. The parade exhibitors seemed to be an absolute perfect representation of the long-held traditional values of early America. Patriotism, religion, industry, family. My favorite was the local veterinarian who breeds dalmatians.

Being a city girl, I'm not all that familiar with Oxen and much to BD's amusement I was really really intrigued with these giant cow like beasts. They were H U G E. I wanted to touch one, but never mustered the courage. Plus, I'm not familiar with the proper social etiquette of petting Oxen. You might notice that the Oxen on the right in the picture below has the camera dead-locked in his gaze. In the split second after this picture was taken, that Oxen took another 4 big steps straight in our direction before his master could get a handle on him. As she steadily shoved the Oxen back into the road and passed us within inches she yelled "Sorry! He loves cameras!" I nearly wet myself. And that's the story about when an Oxen from Sandwich, New Hampshire almost ate me.