Waterloo

Here are some pictures....then the story.

Sorry I haven't posted a misspelled, typo-ed filled blog post in a while. Truthfully I just couldn't get the juices flowing to do it. 

We left St Louis sometime last week to do our show in Donnellson, IA, The Lee County fair.  The town is a little ag-town (ag as in agriculture...no typo there) and had no grocery store, hardware store, laundry, and only one stop light. But they drew a pretty darn good sized crowd. We are convinced they came out of the corn.   They were also a pretty awesome crowd (all of them).  We did three days and the first two days the weather hovered in the low to mid 80s but really high humidity so there was a lot of sweating and a lot of liquid consumption.  The last day, Saturday, it was well above 90 and hit 102* on the heat index.   It was the first time I did not wear my full costume, preferring the vest and the small top hat. But by second show the top hat was gone too.  

As we performed our very last show to a huge crowd I saw in the Northwest a long straight ling of ominous black clouds about 2 to 3 hours away.  Sparks of light accompanied the clouds.  In spite of me giving the call back stage to start the pack up early the crew took their time and were caught with their pants down when the surreal gush of sand and wind blew through the fairgrounds like a scene from a movie. That was followed by the large rain drops of a real humdinger of a storm.   It would last all night with the loudest thunder I have heard in years. Fortunately I came out to check on progress of the load in an hour before the storm hit and got most of the "water" threatened equipment in.  The rest was loaded under the storm clouds and rain.   That meant they spent the next day pulling things out to repack everything properly an clean up the stuff that got wet.   I notice one strange thing about women and men in the load up.  Women are capable of chatting and getting the work done, men have to stop what they are doing each time they say something or stop to think about what is said.   Two of our crew had a serious problem with this and got yelled at a few times.  I guess I became Charelton Heston from, The Greatest Show on Earth where he played the tough nosed circus boss, but it had to be done. 

We did make the local paper front page. 

Cynthia is on the front page of the admissions page for Berea College. 

A Family  made a montage of  their experience with us.

We moved up from Lee to Waterloo for a three day respite.  We move on tomorrow to Cherokee Co Fair in Mid Central Iowa. Shows start on Thursday.  This is our second year back.  While in Waterloo we did our running around and restocking after having no stores in the last place.  We also met with a few great friends here in town. We had lunch with the Versteegt's; Mami has so much fun with the Misses. While I had a great visit with Vaughn and the kids kidnapped Eric to go fishing. We had a wienie roast.
Later I met with my friend Marty and he introduced me to the owner of the RV park that also owns a huge water park, a large cabinet making company and a number of other things. Super nice man.

In the three days in Waterloo we went from Sunday (very warm) to Monday (very windy) to today (Very cold).  Another polar vortex brought the mild weather.

Tomorrow: asphalt for a 3 hour drive.

I will try to get more pictures out this week.....