NY Folk Festival

Our first expedition into upstate NY. And just so you know, I checked, to make sure I am using the proper definition of "upstate". So we were about 2 1/2 hours almost straight north of The City. The festival was on a green hillside overlooking Massachusetts, which was only a few miles to the east of us. The first thing I must note was how utterly rural the drive was, after only about a 1/2 hour out of NYC. I don't know what I was expecting, but this was shocking. It was beautifully green and thickly forested. There were almost no towns or restaurants even visible from the "parkway" we were traveling along. This first picture shows pretty much what the whole drive looked like. Lots and lots of trees. I can see why this area rocks in the Fall--in the NW those would be evergreens, but these all have leaves.
It was steamy and hot. Several serious thunderstorms. The rain never really soaked us--we were luckily able to duck under cover when it started. So really, for the substantial amount of rain that fell this weekend we didn't get all that wet. Well, the kids did, especially during their water balloon fight and when they made a slip and slide on a tarp and hillside. There were three stages, a really great Mime clown that we saw twice with the kids. The craft area for kids was well stocked, and they happily spent hours playing with play doh, making masks and painting between music events. The food and craft vendors were interesting--similar to the type of things found at Portland Saturday Market or Oregon Country Fair.
For Maya, the highlight was playing with Zoey--she is also 7 and starting 2nd grade this year. Her dad and soon to be stepmom were the ones who gave us tickets to the festival--they are very involved in the folk scene around here and we had met them a couple months ago at a Chris Thile show in New Jersey.
Here is all of us in our "festival camping" spot--which turned out to be great--close to the music so sometimes we just stayed there listening to the music from afar. Our favorite show was Dar Williams, by a mile--she is so fun to watch, and this was a special show for her--she brought her (3 year old) son to see the lights that the audience couldn't restrain themselves from showing during "Iowa". It was pretty sweet. Then we came home and found that we only missed her by a few years--she used to live in our very same building! Small world...
Banchi did fine while we were gone. Our neighbors reported a little howling when he got lonely. The dog walker said he was the best dog he has ever walked, and he decided to buy our couches too...so that worked out well.
I must say I am smitten with these tough and beautiful Vermont-type women. They wear skimpy little sundresses over their deeply tanned skin. Their laugh lines are deep and their hair is long and slightly messy. The boots they inevitably have on (to matter-of-factly cope with rain and mud) don't seem to be juxtaposed with the dresses so much as a natural reaction to being outside and doing what works, without a thought as to how it might appear to others. Their crunchiness is more somber and grounded than the west-coast variety--maybe there is less friendliness but more wisdom. They say with a wink "I think your politics are safe here..." and they manage to be patriotic while expertly criticizing the parts that they don't like. But then again we were at a folk festival.
We discovered that the north is the cheapest direction from which to enter NYC. Only 75 cents in tolls, as opposed to $6 from just about any other direction. Good to know. We also discovered a great Costco on the way back home with these cool sloped people movers that take you from the covered parking garage up a story and into the store while holding your cart magically to the moving floor. We further discovered that unloading a car full of damp and entropied camping gear along with a Costco run takes a lot of work, even with an elevator. For a considerable duration of time the sidewalk, lobby and hallways of our apartment building were strewn with our gear, much in the same fashion as a too-small garage sale. We have our work cut out for us tomorrow--getting all that camping gear shoved back into whatever tiny little cubbyhole form whence it came.