My busy fall season of festivals started with the Wood County Fair in the last week of July, and now in the second weekend of October, ends with the best Grand Rapids Apple Butter Fest in recent memory.
Tiny Grand Rapids, Ohio is typically swamped with 50,000 or more people thanks to the nationally-renowned festival held the second Sunday in October. Today's crowd seemed a bit smaller, most likely due to the threat of rain and storms. Suffice to say, the rain held off for much of the day, and a combination of warm winds and mid-seventies temperatures created a little bubble of summer long enough to make jackets optional.
I toured most of the festival today in a couple of hours. Crafts were plentiful, artists had some interesting wares on display (including a shoutout to former Otsego classmate Jason Hatfield with his Mountain Sky Photography booth), and food was cheap and delicious.
Perhaps the best surprise of the day: meeting up with Lacey and her family, who offered my mom and I great hospitality to rest, relax, and eat at their house. Along with buying some apple butter for me, Lacey treated us to home cooking, a quick tour of her parents' updated house, and a little casual time to catch up. The encounter was entirely unexpected but gracefully executed.
In between walking, shopping, and visiting, I ran into at least a dozen people from my past at Otsego, including some former close friends. One thing is abundantly clear: my memory of people from ten years ago is woefully outdated, and I will be in for a bit of culture shock next year at our class reunion.
I finished the festival around 1:00pm with a walk through the historical reenactment camps and a trip down Front Street to get my favorite homemade ice cream. I have been wanting to try Tom's BBQ for months, and today I finally took the plunge and had a delicious cheeseburger and their famous fries (spoiler: they were good, but not great).
Overall this was a great year for the festival. While I am tired of the stale Wood County Fair, the shrinking Roche de Boeuf Festival, and the overly-pretentious Black Swamp Arts Festival, thanks to the wonderful atmosphere and spirited people, the Apple Butter Fest is without a doubt my favorite festival year after year.
B3 out.
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