The following I have been working on for a while. I have had rotten luck with wi-fi connection so I am using minutes, data and money up on my phone to get this one out. No pix until I can get to a good solid hotspot.
Howdy! Sit back for a spell and allow me to spin a yarn
about a family who travels around the country, currently in Courtland, VA,
performing variety and circus arts. In this episode we find the Kent’s at the
Franklin-Southampton Fair in southern Virginia after a day off and a less than
simple drive from North-west West Virginia.
I say, “less than simple” because the Blue Ridge Mountains portion of
the Appalachians sits between the two states and GPS wanted to take me on small
windy, steep mountain roads when I wanted 4 lane interstates. So I had to constantly ignore the GPS and
stick to the old paper map and follow the biggest roads we could find. This is because the 34’ RV pulling the
trailer and the Ford van pulling the bigger trailer are happier on the larger
roads; yet there were still lots of curves and turns and hills to climb.
We had a day off so we took that day to visit Monticello,
the home of Thomas Jefferson. The man was a genius. Strangely as I learned more
about him I found myself liking him less. I suppose that is true of many people
when the veil has been removed and they learn more intimate details of famous
people’s lives. But that aside, the
view from his home was breath-taking and the house itself very cool. I am always surprised at how small the rooms
of those old mansions were, yet often housed many many people. Tom’s daughter ran the household. She had
many children and from a tiny little room she slept, kept office, and
home-schooled her kids. Mami loves
museums and so we had to stop at any plaque or information spot to read
everything! Titus started the tour with
us but he doesn’t do well in this type of situation so Jim, who had visited
Monticello in the 5th grade, took Titus around the grounds and did a
few balancing stunts for the docents. Then when we came off he hooked in with
another tour and went in to see, in particular, Tom’s music stuff in the parlor
and Tom’s office/bedroom. I salute the
600+ slaves TJ owned over the years who built his home, who tended his fields
and home, and who gave him comfort and ease so he had the time to pursue his
multitude of projects. Without them
perhaps he would not have been as successful as he was. I did learn something I had not known, he
died penniless and everything had to be sold.
The day we pulled out of Mannington, WV was a fine day. We
all slept in and got a late start to our stay over point in Charlottesville,
VA. By the time we arrived the clouds
had formed up and we would have a rainy night. Again we slept late on Monday
and went to Monticello at 2pm. Still
cloudy it was, for the most part a very cool day. It did sprinkle once just as we came out of
the “inside the house” part of the tour.
I liked that they called the privy “the necessary room” at
Monticello. Tired and hungry we got
back to the RV park around 6 and had dinner.
The camp didn’t have the best
wi-fi and Verizon was very very spotty so it wasn’t until then that I got an email
telling me that my great friend and brother, JC, had had a heart attack on
Friday night. I wanted to see how he was so like you might see in a movie or
maybe you have experience this yourself, I went hunting for a good signal with
my phone. I found a square foot spot atop a speed bump just outside the camp
office. I stood there carefully and
talked to a very upbeat JC at the hospital.
He was to have a stint put in that very day. When he took the phone from his wife, before
speaking to me, he pretended to talk to a doctor in the background asking the
pretend doc to remove the thing from his heart because he wanted to talk with
me. Still a sense of humor. While in the
ICU he begged his wife to bring his magic props to him so he can entertain
everyone. She has so far refused; I suppose a show in the ICU would be bad
form. (He’s out of ICU now…I wonder if she brought him any toys?) I hope to speak with him again soon.
We pulled into Courtland Tuesday afternoon and as usual
immediately started set up. Our water supply is 250 feet from the Rv and
crosses two walk ways so we have to roll out the hose (yes we have just enough)
at night and fill the RV’s tank and then hook it up to the regular water inlet
on the rig and do our showers and then roll it back up after all the showers
are done before the fair opens in the morning to save the hose from being
walked on, tripped over, ran over by gators and golf carts. I also had to run down to the hardware store
to pick up a 50amp breaker and 10’ of 10 gage 4C cable to make a pig-tail to
hard wire into the fairs breaker box. I
already have a few different types of breakers and pigtails, but wouldn’t you
know we didn’t have one that matched their box….that’s why we have so many
already. Each state, county, city, etc has its own codes and each fair is a
different age. Heck, we’ve worked a couple of fairs where some of the wiring
isn’t even grounded. At a fair in Iowa last year I was hard wiring into a box
and the box itself gave me a nice shock. Somehow someone confused a hot wire
for a ground and wired the ground to the box. Shocking, right?
Wednesday audiences were small but given our location and
the fact that it was the first day (which are usually slow) and except for the
newspaper article about us the day before (we aren’t on the printed schedule
due to us being a last minute replacement for an act that canceled out on them)
I think we pulled in a good number. Thursday was much better with a small first
show crowd but full second and third show crowds. Audiences down here are
little bit reserved and it helps when there is a rambunctious person or two in
the group to help get the other folks to become more active attractive
audiences. There have been a few folks
who ae fans with us and came out just to see us. Many of them are Fro-stache fans (James’
fans). We started selling fake moustaches
due to Jim’s large fan base.
The flood light on the top of the trapeze (BMT) burned out
so we had to put Victor in a harness to go up and replace the bulb. It made a great attraction for people walking
by watching Jim and Kyle holding the line as Vic Jr flew like Peter Pan up and
down to work on the light. It was a
comedy of errors as wrong sized tools, lost nuts, etc. happened. Murphy’s Law
was in full swing. To save us trouble we moved the cable ladder the rigger and
the artist uses over closer to the light as to save on all the trouble next
time.
Thursday through Saturday went very well. Each day we had
larger and larger crowds. Each fair we
have visited, for the most part, usually have something or other that stands
out as a crowd favorite or tradition. In Iowa there is one fair that has a
chicken round up by the kids, another Iowa fair the big thing is the corn
combine smash-up derby, in West Virginia one fair has a sheep rodeo for the
kids, at the Franklin-Southampton Fair the corn-hole (bean bag toss) is big, I
mean really really big. People practice
all year long to get ready for the event. The cash prizes are nice too.
The other acts at the Virgina fair were a father-son magic
team called “The Almost Amazing Rex and Dana”, a pig racing group, a chainsaw
carver, and a number of famous and not so famous bands. It was a good run and except for a bit of
rain on one day it was good weather-wise.
Well, I suppose this was the first fair where every day I was drenched
with sweat after every show. The humidity was tremendous. But the temperatures
never really got past the low 80s. In
fact, all summer it has been more like Spring or Autumn; summer never really
hit the Midwest and the East this
year.
We left Franklin as fast as we could after the last show. I
think we had a record clean-up. We drove
1.5 hours north and at 1:30AM had a brief stop at an RV camp near Richmond,
VA. I wish we had had time to stop and
visit the sites and explore the history of the area. But we had 24 hours to get
to Maine.
We woke at 7AM and hit the road. We drove until a road jam
at the border of CT and MA. The GPS said
it would be a two hour sit, so we found an RV resort off the highway to stay
the night. It was still dusk when we pulled so we could see the absolutely
beautiful resort we had accidentally come across. There was a mirror still lake
in a forest of pines and furs and Oaks and Ash.
The smells were overwhelming.
Sadly it was a bit rustic with no wi-fi or black water dump (the dumping
station was in an inconvenient alcove of the park that my rig couldn’t fit
into; a pulling back out place on a hill. )
Since we were only 4 hours away from our fair we slept a
little later and left at 9am. The GPS
took me on a route I had never taken before due to road work and traffic. The four hour drive turned into 5.5
hours. By this time I am convinced
that there are more trees in the US than in the Amazon. I never tire of seeing
trees. I try to see if I know what tree is which. But it is nice to see human
settlements from time to time or maybe a lake or a field.
We got into Maine mid-afternoon and began set up on
Monday. The set up went smoothly,
mostly due to the mild weather.
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