Rensselaer Adventures

This blog reports events and interesting tidbits from Rensselaer, Indiana and the surrounding area.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Fall Festival has some weather problems (Updated)

I visited the Fall Festival on Saturday morning. This year the festival has carnival rides in the Midway, though not by the same company that does the rides for the County Fair. I tried to read the name of the company from the shirts of the employees, but could not make it out.
 There were ten or twelve food vendors, most of them different from those that come to the County Fair. One of the vendors was a food truck that dispensed frozen yogurt.
 I have seen this vendor before--I recognize the typeface that they use.
 There were some trailers or RVs in the camping spots, but not nearly as many as the Fair has. Though the festival is quite large, it seems small in the venue--the county fair really is a big event.
 There were numerous acts scheduled for the free stage. In the morning Natalie Brouwer sang.
 Then in the afternoon the rain came. I got an inch and a half in my rain gauge, about the same as what the downtown station reported and more than twice as much as the airport recorded. It was enough to flood roads in Rensselaer and it chased away the crowds at the Fall Festival. At 4:00 the free stage was empty though an act was supposed to be there. Even though the vendors were inside, there were few people to stop by. Some of the outdoor events have been postponed or canceled.
Maybe the weather on Sunday will be better for festival goers.

Update Sunday:
The name of the carnival ride provider is Sterling Crown Carnival.

On Sunday the Weed Wacker Pulling Association had a competition next to the Retired Iron building. Despite its name, the web page says that the motors are from chain saws.
The outhouse that was added to the Jasper County Historical Society area last year now has a plaque. I did not realize that it was a WPA outhouse, a "Roosevelt Privy". You would think that by the 1930s outhouses would have been disappearing, replaced by indoor plumbing. But I guess they were not disappearing as fast as I would have expected.

 Another item from the past: a new comment was left on on old post. It tells a little about soda fountains in Rensselaer.

For the last two days, and perhaps for the last three, the Iroquois has set a daily record for stream flow. The records go back 65 years. Normally August, September, and October are dry months with very low flow in the river. The high levels for these months are not much different from the average during the spring months.

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