August 5, 2011
Gallopolis has been a blast. It was so good, that we decided to stay an extra day and put off the pending 8 hour drive to Chicago for another day.
When I made my first post at McDonald’s I was actually interrupted by a hefty woman who sat down at the booth I was at and just started talking. I learned more than I wanted to about her sex life and her lazy husband but it was entertaining in some ways. She also clued me into the county fair that was taking place that week. It is the biggest junior fair in all of Ohio. That means it’s the biggest small one or something nonsensical like that. They do tractor pulls, play country music, eat any type of food you can fry, and later in the week they would be putting on a lawnmower demolition derby.
Okay, I don’t know what a tractor pull is and the food has been abysmal so far, but I’m hooked. I’m in. Thom’s in. The Aarons are in. We’ll go check this thing out.
To kill time until the backwoods ho-down was to “git goin’”, we rode Aaron’s motorcycle around by the banks of the river. Like any of those old 70′s cafe bikes, it did what it was best at. It broke down. Twice. Aaron got it back up and running after we (Thom and Aaron) pushed it up the damn hill. We checked out a cemetery that overlooked the town and explored a bit.
Aaron made us some great leather belts in his shop to use on the trip. It’s pretty amazing to see all the work that goes into them and it was awesome of him to give us our own to wear. Here he is making the belts and a few other shots from the leather shop (note, all of the belt photos were shot by Thom):
After I was wearing the finest leather in Gallopolis, we went and got pizza. It was really good in comparison to Thom’s vegetarian burrito with complimentary chicken in it. I only mention the pizza because the toppings on the pizza are put on first, then the sauce and cheese. So the toppings are actually “bottoms” here, and that’s okay, because this is Gallopolis, and people are just as backwards as the pizza.
We went to the fair and first checked out the tractor pull. For people like me who don’t know what that is, I’ll explain… It’s a tractor pull. Seriously. It’s just a tractor pulling a weight. Like a world’s strongest man competition, but even dumber. I saw some novelty in it and was able to have a laugh about it, but people really take this seriously. And they watch it for hours. Multiple hours of watching a tractor pull something. Here look:
We wondered around the fair and enjoyed not fitting in. I missed the cattle and pig auction which probably would have been cool. We played some games (like the one where you swing the giant hammer to ring the bell at the top). We did a lot of people watching. The critters (that’s what Aaron calls the denizens of Gallopolis) were depressing and entertaining. But we left the fair to go to Point Pleasant, WV.
This is the town made famous by the movie the Mothman Prophecies. I saw the movie years ago and remember it being pretty creepy. The short story is, this “Mothman” creature appears to people right before some disaster is about to happen. There are numerous accounts of this taking place all over this area. In one case, the Mothman appeared to multiple people just before a major bridge over the Ohio River collapsed and killed a lot of people. It’s not known if this thing causes it or only warns people. I generally think this is all silly, but it’s fun to check out. And the statue they erected for it is pretty creepy.
