Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Chalk Art Festival

We had the chance to go to the Chalk Art Festival last weekend, and it was amazing! The festival has been going on for six years now.  This year there were 65 amateur and professional artists that created chalk drawings.  I am so happy we happened to be here on the right weekend so that we could go to the festival!  It was really interesting to watch the artists work from a small photo to create a much larger drawing using only chalk.

Steve and Scott look excited, right?
Another fun aspect of the chalk festival is the voting.  The public votes for drawings with the best use of color, the best animal, most likely to be hung in a museum, and best overall.  The funniest thing I saw at the festival was a drawing of two giant pieces of bacon with the caption "Best Animal?"

  
"Best Animal?" Haha
Here are some pictures of my other favorite drawings, along with the drawings that were voted best in each category!

Monsters Inc.
For the Birds
People's Choice 1st Place & Most Likely to be Hung in a Museum
People's Choice 2nd Place & Best in Show
Iron Man (People's Choice 3rd Place)
Best Use of Color
Best Animal
These pictures barely do justice to the chalk festival and the drawings themselves. Most of the drawings were large, but some of them were huge! And the details of the drawings were amazing.  As we walked around, we could see most of the artists were covered from head to toe in chalk -- not surprising at all, considering they'd been drawing for about 7 hours at that point.

The festival was another amazing experience that we've had this summer, and I am so happy we could go.  I've officially added "participate as an artist in the chalk art festival" to my bucket list, although I'm going to have to improve my skills in order to be up to the task :)

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Wisconsin State Fair

Last weekend we went to the state fair with Scott and Amber.  We had heard things about the fair, specifically about the food and the people, so we were curious to see what everyone was talking about. It didn't disappoint!

I have never seen so much fried food in my life.  Seriously.  There were deep fried fruits and vegetables, as well as a variety of deep fried desserts, such as oreos, snickers, and s'mores! I think some of the people in Wisconsin must be crazy -- how else would they think to take s'mores and deep fry them? I guess I can't complain too much though, considering the results.  We decided to try a fried snickers bar, which was surprisingly delicious! They sprinkled powdered sugar on top and then added some chocolate sauce, which made it even better :-)

Deep fried snickers
After the snickers bar, we ate some deep fried cheddar cheese curds. These are a big deal in Wisconsin!  We had all tried some earlier this summer, but they are too tasty to pass by! The cheese curds at the fair were really good.

Deep fried cheddar cheese curds...and a photobomb by Scott!
While wandering around the fair in search of more treats, we stumbled upon two guys who were starting a comedy routine.  I'm really glad that we stuck around to watch the routine because it was one of my favorite parts of the fair! The two guys were really funny, and they involved the audience a lot.  At the end of the show, one of the guys sat on an extremely high unicycle and the other was standing on the top rung of a latter, and then they tossed flaming torches back and forth -- it was both impressive and hilarious!

The comedy routine
Following the comedy show, we took a quick stop at a cream puff shop.  I can admit that cream puffs aren't my favorite treat, but we had heard that these were decent.

Our main goal for the fair was to find the infamous pizza cones, but we hadn't had any luck.  I was starting to lose hope.  Luckily, we decided to walk down one more aisle of food tents, and we finally saw the sign for pizza cones!  Imagine a slice of pizza that gets folded into the shape of an ice cream cone, with the crust on the outside and all of the toppings inside.  They were delicious!! They were also really funny to eat because the cheese was so stringy. We got some fun pictures, and it was definitely a highlight of our fair experience :-)

PIzza Cone!
Did I mention they were really cheesy and stringy?
On our way out of the fair, we stopped and got some jumbo cups of old fashioned lemonade, which was easily the best lemonade I've ever had! They squeezed real lemons right before our eyes. I wanted to take the whole lemonade stand home with me!

Best Lemonade EVER
All in all, we had a lot of fun at the state fair and we tried some funny foods. I would definitely go again because we didn't manage to find all of the things we'd been told about, like the root-beer milk or the pig races. Still, it was a fun memory to make!