I wanna be a carnie!Elkhorn Campground here in Frankfort, Kentucky was absolutely crammed to the gills this weekend. We wanted to get a photo, but it wouldn't have done the scene justice. Hundreds of RVs packed into every possible site, overflowing next to the camp host's house, and parked randomly near the pavillion plus any other nooks and crannies that one could squeeze a trailer in.
Especially interesting was the trailer parked next to us which had multiple entry doors with numbers over them, each seeming to lead to an individual compartment and people were coming and going at very odd hours. They also seemed to know folks at lots of the other sites and referred to themselves as a family who looked out for one another. At first we couldn't figure it out. Perhaps they were temporary farm or construction workers, but Mom had heard they had just arrived a few days ago.
Then she figured it out - Carnies!!! The County Fair was going on just a mile or so down the road and these folks had arrived the day before it started. That's not a trailer, it's a carnie bunkhouse!I can't wait to see them all, we're gonna have a free show right here, come on over for the big free show! Gather around the windows and watch! There gonna bring out the Fire Eater, the Snake Girl, the Indonesian midgets ... just keep watching the doorways ... I'm gonna wake up the Fat Lady, sweet little Tammy from Miami. It takes four men to hug her and a boxcar to lug her. Can the Viking Giant fit in there? He stands nine feet seven inches tall, weights six hundred and sixty three pounds and has a hand the size of a country ham! I think I smell the Princess of Fire, oh wait that's just Ree, too much caribou. Anyway this is gonna be great!
Sure enough, towards the end of the fair we did see them wearing ID badges and logo'd polo shirts and carting fair prizes back and forth, like live rabbits! I don't think we had any of the real talent here in the park just some A&S men, thats age and scale operator for you non-carnies.
The only excitement, other then the visual treat, they provided was that they traveled with a cat. We found this out when we were awakened by a bizarre noise on top of our coach in the middle of the night. Ree woofed a warning and Mom peeked out the bedroom window to see the door of the lady carnie's compartment open up and a cat scramble in.
Today we got to help them find the cat. The lady and another carnie were wandering around the campground, looking under RVs, including ours, for about an hour after they'd hooked up to pull out. When they brought out the garden hose and started spraying into the wheel wells, Dad figured out the cat was missing and had a sneaking suspicion he knew exactly where it was. So he goes outside, opens up the engine compartment of our coach, and sure enough there's a cat perched atop the Cummins ISM450 staring back at everyone. They were very impressed and offered him a job as an A&S man but he declined. Something about it affecting his golf swing.
We were also reminded how cool it is when Mom goes grocery shopping when she's hungry. Besides the lactose-reduced milk, TP, and calorie-free seltzer on her list, she took inspiration from that fine southern gal Paula Deen and brought back the fixin's for a hearty breakfast of buttermilk biscuits and country ham. While we have tortilla and salsa aisles in Texas and New York has the spaghetti and tomato sauce shelves, Kentucky Krogers have a whole kiosk dedicated to country ham. There's whole hams, ham steaks, sandwich slices, ham salad, and what we now have a package of, biscuit slices.
Guess what we had for breakfast??? BUUUUUURRRRRPPPPPPP!
Your Kentucky Puppy,