the Matthews Covered Bridge Festival

Today we drove about ten minutes south to the small town of Matthews to take part in their annual Covered Bridge Festival. I couldn't find my camera before we left, but I took some instagram shots of the festivities.



We heard the local high school marching band play, but we were too early for the tractor pull. Rosie got to jump in one of the inflatable bounce houses, and Jack found a Neil Young record at one of the booths. While Rosie was jumping, I asked the attendant, a teenage Miley Cyrus look-alike, if she knew what an "elephant ear" was. "Yeah," she said, smiling as if she found it a little charming that I didn't. "Well," she corrected, "I don't actually know what it is. It's like, breaded, with cinnamon."

We sampled one later - it's a long thin piece of fried bread topped with cinnamon sugar. We didn't have any breaded pork tenderloins, which looked like the biggest selling item at the fair.


We bought a butterfly net, too -- something Rosie has been talking about for weeks now. Then we did a lot of running around.


And finally Rosie got to have a horseback ride. She wasn't scared a bit.