Completly different - part 2

Tractors along York St.

Probably it won’t come as a surprise to anyone reading this blog that a highlight of a fair dedicated to farmers and farming is the old tractor show. The Farmer’s Fair tractor show has takes up two blocks of town. Two groups of people seem to love the tractors the most—the oldtimers who stand around talking to other oldtimers about how their farm used to have that exact same tractor, and the kids.



Another old fire truck, though not as old as the 1919 truck posted yesterday



The tractors are such a hit that just having them sit around during the weekend isn’t enough. A tractor leads each section of the parade on Saturday night, too. Often, the tractors are driven by oldtimers with a kid on their lap. Little kids know they have become big kids when they are allowed to ride on a tractor with grandpa (or grandma). 

By the standards of the county fair, Dillsburg’s exhibit hall doesn’t have nearly the variety of contests, awards or entrants. Quilts and whoopee pies win the most money and bragging rights here. Crop art is also a pretty big draw, though I’ve never understood the judging rules of what makes one piece of crop art better than another. Is it the number of different types of seeds used? Artistic merit? The ones I think should win are never the winners, so there must be something more to it that I’m not understanding. Still, I think I’d enjoy making a crop art during a cold week of winter than I would doing a jigsaw puzzle. Maybe I’ll get around to it one of these years.

You, however, will not need to wait for years for Roundtop Ruminations to get back to its usual woodsy topics. That should happen tomorrow, assuming of course that the predicted rain doesn’t make the forest so dark I can’t take one.