TW’s Apple Festival Birthday

Years ago, when I lived in the Upstate and TW lived in Florida, she brought the little kids up for her birthday. I searched the internet for some place fun and interesting to go and celebrate her birthday and I found the Hendersonville Apple Festival. So we jumped in the car and we drove up. It was fun but more importantly it started a birthday tradition – that’s what happens around here… you do something once and suddenly some people consider it a new tradition. So, every year I’ve struggled to come up with “apple festival” ideas for TW’s birthday.

It hasn’t been easy. Florida doesn’t really have a helluva lot of apple festivals! One year the kids painted still life apple paintings and we had our own apple festival with bobbing for apples in a bucket and stuff like that. Another year I took her to St Pete, to a quilt shop, and we looked for “apple” fabric (as well as other fabric.)

This year, I again turned to the internet and found Apple River Canyon State Park, Illinois and discovered they were in fact having an old fashioned family festival. I sent the driving directions to my iPhone and sent secondary driving instructions to my phone for another possibility just in case that festival was a dud…

We started the morning with breakfast at Hamilton’s which is right across the street from us, and a restaurant we had not visited. We all enjoyed it, RJ in particular. While paying the bill, I got a work related emergency phone call and had to run back home to resolve a problem – then we started our drive (about an hour later than I’d originally planned.)

We drove. And drove. And drove. And never thought we’d find it – but then, we did. Except there was no festival! It was just a park with very few people in it. WTF??? How frustrating to drive that far and then … nothing.

So we drove out of the park and proceeded to get lost. Driving around the “mounds” while amusing was really not anyone’s idea of a fun birthday and we were all pretty grouchy about being locked up in the car with no payoff when suddenly we stumbled into Elizabeth Illinois. Since we have an Elizabeth, that perked us all up. We perked up even more when we discovered Apple Valley Fort… which was apparently where the festival had been held.

Who knew there was an Apple River State Park and an Apple River Fort? We didn’t but we know it now, damn it.

We arrived at the fort about 15 minutes after the festival ended but the reenactors were nice and showed us around, one of them shot his gun for us (hah.) and we watched the special little Apple Valley Fort movie. And then it was back in the car for us.

Not quite the apple festival birthday I’d envisioned but whatever, we went with it and it was amusing. We also stopped at Beefaroo on the way home, for dinner. Interesting. Worst food ordering experience we’ve ever had, but interesting and everyone was happy enough with their food.

The next day, I decided we’d take a chance on the other apple birthday festival I’d considered before settling for Apple River…. we headed to Long Grove for their Irish fest.

Long Grove is a little like Helen, Georgia (not the Bavarian part but the theme touristy town idea) so I thought everyone would be both amused and entertained, even if they weren’t really interested in the Irish fest part of it. (though we did enjoy the Irish dancers.)

Long Grove has a shop called The Apple Haus and we all had apple donuty type things, apple cider, apple smoothies and we bought a couple of cookbooks (ask TW to blog about those, on Retro Food – they’re very amusing and very retro…)

They have a yarn store that we all enjoyed and an interesting craft store. There was a gift shop where we found a ton of great gift ideas for just about everyone and another gift shop that had some gourds that Liz and I really liked. I think Liz would like to try her hand at some gourd design.

Even with the confusion between Apple River Canyon and Apple River Fort, it was a pretty successful apple festival birthday weekend.

And TW, this year… you are 39: