Late Night Ramblings
Okay, I probably had some unreasonable expectations going into it. Remember the way Homer Simpson pictured Germany, the "land of chocolate?" I guess I was imagining that Chocolate Fest would be similar. At the very least, I thought there would be chocolate everywhere. Not so much. There was a tent, and that's where all the chocolate was located. The rest of it was your typical fried festival food (not that I'm complaining...the corn dog was excellent). I think Josh put it best when he called it a "glorified church festival." Pretty much.
I was disappointed that it was more fest than chocolate, but what can you do? We caught a good chunk of Pat McCurdy's show, tried to win a hermit crab on the midway, saw some baby tigers. It was fun overall. Muddy, though. We parked in a field (and apparently just missed the rain), and Josh's car now looks like he's been offroading.
On Sunday, Jo and I went on a picnic at the botanical gardens. We wandered the gardens, shlepped through the woods, smelled the lilacs...it was fun. Due to my pathetic sense of direction, we ended up on the side of the visitor's center where I never actually go, trying to find the path through the peonies. Instead, we saw something lying in a field that looked like a baby deer. Which seemed weird for it to be just hanging out in the open. So we walked closer. Sure enough, there was a little fawn, all alone and right smack in the middle of the lawn. It didn't seem hurt, but it let me get really close. Based on previous encounters with wildlife, I half expected its angry mother to come charging out of the woods at any moment. Jo was convinced the fawn was abandoned, so she tried unsuccessfully to approach a young employee about it. He basically told her there was nothing he could do, and that it had been there for about a week. I thought it looked pretty healthy, and not at all like it had been surviving all on its own for that long. And it wasn't hurt, because when we walked away, it got up and ran around the field. Jo wasn't convinced, and she was reluctant to leave it without doing anything. I was about to explain the occasional brutality of nature to her when I saw a larger shape out of the corner of my eye. A doe emerged from the woods, and her fawn bounded over to her, little white tail wagging. She stood protectively in front of her baby for a moment, looking at us, so I waved to her, hoping we weren't about to get charged by an angry deer. Then she turned and disappeared back to the woods, her fawn trotting happily behind her. All was right with the world.