Labored Day

Saturday night we ventured to the Indiana State Fairgrounds for the German-American Klub's Oktoberfest. Faithful readers may recall that we tried this back in 2006 with little success, but since the festival had moved to a new, larger location, we thought we'd give it a second run. Boy was that a krappy decision.

For years, the local Oktoberfest was held just down the road from where I lived as a child. In fact, we used to ride our bikes onto the grounds, leaving little bike tracks all over their nice soccer fields. It always seemed like an odd location for a festival, tucked back into the trees in a relatively small space. Therefore when I saw that it was now being held at the fairgrounds, it seemed like a good thing.

In reality, all the new location accomplished was killing off any remaining ambiance that the previous site held, leaving visitors with only high priced food and beverages to show for the evening. The new location was one of the exhibition halls at the fairgrounds. When we entered, there was no music playing and virtually no decorations indicating a celebration. There were a few tables featuring people selling things like gutter guards and ShamWow's -- both staples of German kulture.

Outside there were a handful of rides for the kids, including pony rides in which Grant partook. Someone forgot to remind my mother-in-law that pony's poo, leaving her with a shoe-full of fun. Otherwise, there was a place where they were showing the skills of police attack dogs (yet another staple of German kulture), and a few food vendors. That was about it. We lasted about a half an hour, deciding that rather than spend $20 each on food at the festival, the money would be better spent at one of our favorite local restaurants -- Santorini's.

I guess I don't understand why the German American Klub doesn't take some cues from other, more successful local heritage festivals. The Greek Fest is perennially enjoyable, and you could almost replicate it exactly by replacing all the blue and white with red, black, and gold and selling strudel instead of baklava. Otherwise -- pretty similar. For our family though, returning to Oktoberfest in the future will be a hard sell.

At some point between Saturday and Sunday, our family began experiencing what can only be politely referred to as "the sh*ts." It was miserable. Poor Grant was awakened by it in the middle of the night, unsuccessfully trying to navigate to the bathroom in the dark before his shorts received a donation. Erin got it the next day, and I got it in the middle of the night Sunday. We're not sure if we ate something bad (this might be a warning against the intermingling of Germans, Greeks, and Mexicans...apparently they don't all get along, despite a general love of oom-pah music), but luckily it appears to now be making an exit. (Actually, it's always been about the exit.)

On Monday, we loaded up on drugs and took the kids to the park in an effort to escape our afflicted house. We went to Holliday Park in Indy because it was rumored to have a massive playground for kids. This turned out to be correct. There were basically three huge sets of playground gear, with enough slides to guarantee Grant both enjoyment and injury.

For my amusement, Holliday Park is also the site of a set of ruins which I wanted to check out. The short story is that Indianapolis acquired a set of statues from a building in New York that was being demolished back in the 50's. The statues were placed in the park, and Indianapolis spent the next 40 years trying to do something meaningful with them, resulting in what now appears to be a hodgepodge of statues and stones from various buildings previously standing in Indianapolis. The original statues are still standing, but are now surrounded by lots of weeds and ugly fencing. It's still an interesting display, and it gave me something to look at while Grant tried to decide if he was ready to try the taller slides in the park.

During our visit, Grant learned a valuable lesson about bees. He was standing just a few feet away from me when he let out a shriek and began doing a little jig. I ran over to find his finger quickly swelling, and him screaming about "bees" through his tears. This ended our fun at the park, and we spent the rest of the day nursing Grant's stung finger back to health.

So to recap our holiday -- bad festival, diarrhea, and bee stings. Bring it on Fall Break. Show us watcha' got.