Road-tripping: Bedford Fall Festival 2011
This weekend, we headed out to central PA to check out the 47th Annual Bedford Fall Foliage Festival. We took a scenic trip down the turnpike and found ourselves in the midst of this craziness:
A festival of epic proportions! Arts, crafts and decorations of all sorts, gourmet foods, and food trucks galore! We were acutely aware that we provided a full 25% of the Asian contingent at the whole festival...REPRESENT!
...OF COURSE we had to eat a buffalo burger and buffalo polish sausage. Delicious!
Since Bedford is fairly close to State College, we were filled with glee to see this sight:
OH YEAH. This was our first taste of ice cream from the Penn State Creamery, and we selected Butter Pecan and Death by Chocolate. We give both flavors two thumbs up. It was rich, smooooth and creamy, and amazingly it was relatively heat stable. We walked around a bit with them and they did not reduce down into a puddle of ice cream soup. Maybe the high percentage of solid-at-room-temperature butterfat content?!
Other food samplings later in the day included some microbrewed root beer in a 32-oz redneck themed metal mug,
a yummy Carolina-style BBQ pulled pork sandwich,
and a GIGANTIC pumpkin whoopie pie (aka gob) that was larger in diameter than the length of my phone...
It was a great festival atmosphere, with old-skool musical entertainment (sans monkeys),
crafts galore,
and we even were lucky to pick the day of the antique car show to attend the festival! A lot of the locals came out to watch the antique car parade, commenting about the drivers by name and calling out greetings. Here are a couple beauties that paraded by our vantage point:
And lastly, the spoils of our day. I decided that most unique, beautiful, and utilitarian purchase I could make was a quilt from a local small business. I absolutely loved the patterns on the fabric of this one, and although it is a little more red-white-and-blue than I felt comfortable with at first, the gorgeous floral sprays and paisleys soften the patriotic overtones.
And in some ways the color scheme is totally appropriate--this trip was very Americana. We are really happy to have found this crazy and fun annual festival, and we are much looking forward to going back next year if possible!
I've never been to this festival but I have lots of Central PA friends who go yearly! So glad you got to try Creamery ice cream. It IS good, but my favorite Creamery product is their yogurt. It is the absolute best I have ever tasted! I think you can only get it on campus though! That gob looks AMAZING and that quilt is very lovely!
ReplyDeleteOooh, when the kiddos are a little bigger it might be a good trip for the family! There were a lot of kid-themed activities, play acting, a bouncy castle, and face painting sorts of things.
ReplyDeleteWe still have a chunk of the gob in the fridge, we couldn't get through it all in one sitting!