Another fair has come and gone, and I enjoyed my nightly visits to the fairgrounds. My first-ever Jessamine County Fair was an experience that I had a lot of fun with.

Let me begin by confessing that despite my support for carnival games that I wrote about last week, I did not make any attempts this year to bring home an inflated crayon or stuffed alien. I just might have secured a prize by catching the greased pig if I wasn’t bound to my professional duty as a photographer. In all actuality, I did wind up chasing the pig inside the viewfinder of my camera. For those who didn’t attend and watch the event: pigs with a herd of youngsters in hot pursuit can flat out move!

Out in Nebraska, livestock showings and activities are a major factor in all county fairs. So, of course, it is only natural that old habits die hard and I spent some time checking out the livestock showings. I saw some really nice-looking showcases, particularly in the beef cattle and the goats. Congratulations to all of the winners in their classes.

Other highlights for me included the demolition derby and the pulling events. I want to thank all of the folks who let me and my camera wiggle in through the crowd up to the fence to snap some pictures. Fence-side viewing was hard to come by, and if you were lucky enough to make it that far, it was elbow-to-elbow with your neighbors when the events were ready to begin. It is always fun to watch the roar of those engines elicit a wave of cheers from the youngest spectators to the oldest.

And you know what? There’s something strangely satisfying about the crunch of two derby cars on a sunny summer evening…

For the full pictorial recap of my evenings at the fair, I invite everyone to keep an eye out for the Summer 2017 issue of Jessamine Life magazine, which will hit the street in the second week of August!