Beaverton: Carp Island

 A neat place in my hometown that's just a stone's throw from my grandma's old house and the house where my brother and his family now live is Carp Island.  I'm pretty sure that's just our name for it, and I have heard that this used to have other names like Drug Island or Pot Island due to the things people supposedly do or did there, but whatever.  We went there during daylight hours and only saw a couple of other people fishing.  It's a little stony island below the Beaverton Dam, you cross some wobbly stones to get on the small island.  

 

 The Beaverton Dam

 

 Carp Island in the middle in the sunny little Tobacco River valley

 True to the island's name, my brother reeled in a creepy beast from the depths of the Tobacco River.

 I'd never seen a living carp up close before this!

It was a great looking fish, but I don't know anyone in Michigan who eats carp.  It's known as a dirty bottom feeder.  I did look it up online, and found out that they apparently don't taste good in the summer, anyway.  Maybe that's why I've never heard of anyone in Michigan eating them:  They only have a very limited time when they are tasty.  Either way, I'm pretty sure this beast was happy to get back in the water after being checked out and passed around by the kids!

DEMOLITION DERBY!!!

 Hold onto your hats, everybody...let's get ready for the demolition derby!

Before attending this event at the Gladwin County Fair last summer, I thought that a demolition derby was just about crashing cars and rednecks going crazy.  Well, there's kind of more to it than just that.  There are rules, and it was a pretty fascinating bunch of nonsense that I got to witness at this positively enthralling event. 

Safety was a priority.  Firemen and emergency personnel were at hand.  When crashing cars you can't be too careful.  I was impressed, any time a car was stuck, smoking or someone even thought they might smell gas, all the cars were stopped and had to wait until it was clear that there was absolutely no danger.

 There were a number of different events, all accompanied by the announcer's wonderful commentary.  The track was set up so that the cars had a muddy round path around which they had to successfully complete a certain number of laps.  They always drove a warm-up lap, then the judge waved a flag for the cars to start the race, upon which signal the cars would speed up and all hell would break loose.  While driving around the track, some cars got stuck, some overheated, some crashed into others and even became hung up on the other cars.  Really anything could happen.  It was a weird event, it sounds so unappealing, but when you're in the grandstand and any kind of craziness might happen, it was really exciting!

 

 As much as I'm not really a fan of rednecks, the "Redneck Outrage" with its rebel flag flying from the roof was definitely one of my favorite cars.  It summed up the crowd and the whole event pretty well.

 

 One of the weirdest events was "lady drivers" featuring an appearance by this year's Miss Beaverton, the "queen" of my hometown for the year.  Not only did I find it absolutely fabulous that Miss Beaverton was driving in the demolition derby in her own pimped out, trashed car, but I also found it hilarious and kind of ridiculously sexist that the lady drivers all had to drive stupid minivans.

 Nevertheless, it was a pretty rockin' race, with Miss Beaverton getting her front bumper stuck under another van!  Sorry to say she lost the race and they had to pull her out with a tow truck!

 Finally, the last event of the night was "total demolition."  This was what I'd been waiting for.  The previous events had been pretty great, but this was just unadulterated crashing.  8 old cars lined up facing out of a rectangular, blocked-off part of the track especially set up for this event.  There were 4 on the left and 4 on the right, and on the start signal they all threw the cars into reverse and slammed into the middle of the field and backed into each other.  The winner of this event was the last man standing, or, more exactly, the last car running. 

 They just crashed and crashed.

 The Cadillac was destroyed.

I don't even remember who won, was it the Mercury?  No idea.  But Hot Cheese was pretty hilarious!  'Til next year, demolition derby!  I will be back!

Schleppertreffen Tanneberg

This has been quite a summer full of motorized fun for us.  Demolition derbies and a mud bog in Michigan, now a classic tractor show in Tanneberg near Mittweida.  I never saw myself attending events like these, but, well, this is where I live now and I guess I'd better take it as it comes.  Anyway, I was given a clipping with information about this event on Friday after someone overheard me talking about tractors at a school-related function on Tuesday, or better said, I was cursing about the purchase of a THIRD and FOURTH tractor that took place this week and were being hauled back to my house at that very moment.  I guess I shouldn't be worried, we still have a little space left, and if we cut a few more trees and build onto the shed, we'll have space to add to our fleet.  It doesn't matter anyway, because I am outnumbered 3:1 by people in my house who are pretty excitable when it comes to anything with wheels, let alone wheels AND motors, and maybe even hydraulics.  So I guess it's hopeless. In the interest of those I love, I suggested this as a possible weekend activity, which wasn't even necessary, because without my knowing it, it seemed to have been added to our weekend plans already.  So we convinced our Dresden visitors to tag along, piled into the cars and drove out to Tanneberg, beyond the borders of Mittweida near Erlau.  Tanneberg seems to be an intersection with a couple of houses, so after turning onto the road with the "Tanneberg this way" sign, we immediately saw a field with lots of cars and knew we had to be in the right place.

We trudged across the wet field and through the rain, paid our €2.50 per adult and went into the inner yard of a farm.  There were row after row of old, lovingly painted tractors, some even decorated with flowers and flags!  This made my heart jump with glee.  Our tractors are rusty, jerry-rigged, misused, abused workhorses, these were well cared for, polished, slickly painted pieces of history.  Some were even kind of pretty.  They looked cheerful.  Ours look sad.  As crazy as it sounds, these tractors made me smile on this gray wet day.  Have a look for yourself:

 If I had a field, I'd want to drive the Aktivist in the rain...

 ...and the red, very aesthetic Porsche in the sun!

 Note the flowers and East German pride!

 Even pennants were present.

 And...a rubber head?  But why?  When I asked this question, the answer I got was "Well, just because."

 On a side note, I really got a kick out of this bag.  We are such a short distance from the city, and yet we are worlds away.  The bag is advertising Ratron mouse poison-"Innovations for agriculture."  I'd kind of love to have one of these and carry it into that other world where the least it would get would be stares, but maybe even some remarks, which could be entertaining.  Not that I'm a big fan of poison and killing stuff; and mice are cute with their round brown eyes and big precious ears, yes.  But they are also destructive little beasts who will come into your home and garden and take everyhing as if you'd asked them to!  They'll proceed to leave behind their droppings and parasites.  They ate holes in my outside blankets, pooed all over the kids' shed, not to mention that they carry fleas and all kinds nasty stuff that you don't want. They tear up the garden and eat the vegetables.  They're probably chewing through the brake cables on my bike as I type this.   I am waging war on them with my own little Ratron, Reinhold the tomcat, which seems to be the most natural way to deal with the situation.  We were completely overrun with mice before Reinhold came on the scene, but he seems to be running the show now. 

Like I said, I never saw myself attending anything like this back in that other world where we used to live, not in my wildest dreams.  I have to admit, though, it was actually kind of fun.  And I didn't even get to drive a tractor like the kids did.

Glorious America!

 The first big attraction of my trip to Michigan was a visit to the county fair, namely the Gladwin county fair in my home county.  I have pleasant memories of visiting this fair from when I was a child.  My grandparents lived just down the street from the fairgrounds, and I would walk there with them, ride some rides, and look at the farm animals in the barns.  I even got my first cat here, I think I was 5 years old.  He was a beautiful, giant gold tomcat and his name was Patty Paws.  Anyway, it was time to take my kids to this fun place.  It's the perfect fair for me, since it isn't so big and overwhelming, and amazingly also isn't so loud.  For comparison, I visited the Kät in Annaberg-Buchholz several years ago because I'd wanted to relive my youth and have some fair fun, but I did not find it fun at all.  It was incredibly loud, crowded and overwhelming.  I couldn't go on any rides because the whole thing gave me a headache.  All I could do was flee.

This picture was not taken in 2006, it was taken on July 25, 2014.  The Himalaya is a lot faster and scarier than it looks!

Here, however, we were pleasantly surprised.  At first glance, this fair seemed quite small.  But after walking around, deciding which rides we wanted to ride and looking at the cost, the $10 unlimited armbands for rides were definitely worth their weight in gold.  There was a pretty limited number of rides, but enough that we had loads of fun.  The really neat thing was that I remembered most of these rides from my childhood trips to the fairs in Midland and Gladwin counties between 20-25 years ago.  It seems that this was a discount carnival operator who had bought secondhand rides...some were shut down, others seemed in disrepair.  But that just added to the fun:  maybe parts of the rides could come flying off at any second!

 The rusty, squeaking Thunder roll seemed to have seen its last oiling in about 1987.

 The motorcycle ride, one I also recall from my childhood, oh, 29 years ago...

 I actually wouldn't mind having a dunk tank at my house.

 This is another one of my old favorites: the swings.  This one seemed a little more modern, the seats were much more stable than when I was a kid.  It also didn't go as high, but maybe the hydraulics were just broken. I especially loved this one at the GC fair because the operator was so slow and unmotivated, probably also hung over or under the influence or other substances (just my supposition).  He would just let one kid through the gate at a time, shuffle along behind the kid, direct them to a seat, get them hooked in with the bar, then shuffle back, kind of hunched over and always sour-faced and take the next kid in.  It took something like 10 minutes just to get the kids on the ride.  When I used to ride this, I remember just a frenzy running to the swings and the operator would check to make sure everybody was strapped in, then flip the switch and send us hurling through the air.

 Dinner at the fair consisted of ultra salty, delicious popcorn and a can of pop.  (Soda or Limo for the non-Michigan English speakers.)

 A carousel!

The big slide. Friedrich actually wanted to just loop back around and go right back up the stairs, he loved this!  But he had to go out the gate and back in.  Fortunately there are no big lines at this fair!  This was actually my personal favorite, the guy running the thing had a kind of frightening appearance, but he was really nice to the kids and funny.  He was also the kids' favorite operator (or our slightly inappropriate slang for this job is "carnie"--carnival operator.)

 But the real reason we came to fair on this wondrous day was to attend the mud bog.  Above you can see "Crazy Train".  More from Crazy Train later.  A mud bog is a kind of sport or at least entertainment where people prepare a track of mud in a field by digging it out and adding water, then driving various classes of 4-wheel drives through it.  I'd heard of mud bogs before, and my first exposure to one was when we saw our neighbors in Beaverton putting on a private one in 2008 and 2009 (http://sarahonearth.blogspot.com/2008/10/mud-bogg-2nite-lloyds-38th.html  and http://sarahonearth.blogspot.com/2009/05/down-at-mud-bog-driving-past-lloyds.html)  I used to scorn the people who would take part in such events, and might still if I met them in person.  Who knows.  When I was in school the participants in these kinds of things were usually really narrow-minded and nasty, in particular to me and my friends.  Nevertheless, when checking the schedule for the county fair this year, I was intrigued to see that there was an official mud bog on the roster and couldn't resist checking it out.

 I'm not used to this any more, but of course the national anthem was played before the big event.  Everyone had to stand and face the flag.

 You can see how they bring in the big construction machines and prepare the field, a major undertaking.

 Before the thing gets started, the drivers all had to meet and maybe go over the rules.  Finally, the even started a half hour to an hour after the scheduled starting time. 

 The first hour or so was pretty boring.  Street legal trucks would drive in and get stuck.  The competition involved measuring how far they got.

 But then they brought out the big trucks, like "Stroked Out" above.  The name has something to do with the engine, I think the announcer said it was a stroker engine.  My knowledge of engines is limited, so I couldn't tell you what that is. 

 He had an impressive start...

 ...but he too got stuck.

 The Misfit looked a little meaner, maybe he'll have more luck...

 I think he got stuck, too.  After an hour of these stuck trucks, I started getting bored and wondering if we should leave. 

 Then this guy pulled out.  Actually, there'd been one before him, too, but it had been so fast that I missed getting any pictures.  He made it through the pit in something like 3.6 seconds!  As the announcer said, "This is what you're payin' for, folks!"

The next one got stuck, but he certainly didn't give up too quickly.

 A stuck patriot.

Here's a nice montage, but I do not endorse any of the political views shown in this video!

Whatever your views on this kind of thing, the sheer noise and power on display were pretty impressive.  I couldn't do this very often, but once in a while, it's pretty fun.

Goodbye, Gladwin County Fair!  See you tomorrow for the demolition derby!