Showing posts with label Pumpkinfest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pumpkinfest. Show all posts
Saturday, October 5, 2024
Indian Summer
Not sure if “Indian summer” is a phrase you’re still allowed in the age of Woke.
Regardless, we had the perfect Indian summer Saturday in these parts today. Sunshine all day and T-shirt and shorts temperatures.
First weekend in October means it’s Pumpkinfest in Port Elgin. That’s only a hop and a skip from Falling Downs, plus we get to stop off at Tuggies on the Rez for cheap gas and cheap smokes.
The Pumpkinfest is allegedly about the giant vegetables that arrive at what was originally the Port Elgin fall fair. Fall fairs are a big deal in rural Ontario. Every two-bit hick-town has one. Even former two-bit hick-towns that have long since become suburbs of Toronto still have them.
I’m looking at you, Orangeville and Shelburne.
But I digress.
We don’t go to Port Elgin for the two-ton pumpkins. We go for the car show. It comes two or three weeks after the Concours at Cobble Beach. That one is ten minutes down the road, and we’ve been a few times. Fifty bucks to get in the gate. A lot of world-class stuff that arrived in hundred thousand dollar trailers with quarter million tow vehicles. Who doesn’t want to spend fifty bucks to see an actual original Bugatti?
The Pumpkinfest car show, on the other hand, is all stuff the owners drove there. The town blocks off a few blocks of the downtown for a day. You won’t see any Bugattis, but you’ve got the entire catalogue of North American iron, plus a good sampling of European stuff. And it’s absolutely free!
So we wander around downtown Port Elgin for an hour and a half, with Bruno in tow. You can’t imagine how many people want to stop and tell you how beautiful this runt Italian mastiff is. It’s non stop.
When Bruno had his fill of strangers wanting to touch him, we motored down the Lake Huron shore to Kincardine, for lunch at the Erie Belle, where they promote themselves as the “House of Fish & Chips.” I was a fan long before the gluten thing reared its ugly head, and I am happy to report the Erie Belle has gluten-free fish & chips that will rival anything you ever had.
We’re on the patio with Bruno catching the shade under the table, when a gaggle of millennials comes in and settles into the far end of the patio. There’s eight of them, and they’re engaged in a quite lively conversation.
This has no bearing on us whatsoever. We’re at least forty feet away. But about ten minutes in, the Farm Manager remarks that none of them appear to have their phones out.
What? How is such a thing even conceivable?
I was seated with my back to them, but as we were leaving I went over to check them out. I thought at least a few might have their phones flat on the table in front of them, but no!
Who can imagine such a thing?! Eight millennials gathered round a table on a restaurant patio, and not a phone in sight?
There is hope for humanity!
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Cinderella's carriage
Took in the car show over at Pumpkinfest in Port Elgin on Saturday. It offers substantially more bang for the buck than the Cobble Beach extravaganza that happens two or three weeks earlier. That's because Port Elgin charges zero admission, whereas Cobble is $45 per, if I remember correctly.
Port Elgin is a little more grass-roots. Pretty much everything there drove to Port Elgin under its own power, which isn't a claim most of the field at Cobble Beach can make.
Port Elgin is where you'll find a late-sixties muscle car that the loving owner spent ten years and all his disposable income restoring.
Cobble Beach is where you'll find the rarest of rarities that the doting owner dropped off at a high end resto shop and dropped several hundred thousand dollars on its restoration.
They are both well worth-while.
There was some very cool stuff on view. How about a '69 SS 427 Yenko Chevelle?
Saw a '67 Impala SS identical to one I owned; 327 Powerglide, but in blue instead of the beigey-brown of mine.
There was a Rebel Machine in red. First one I'd seen although I'd read there was some built that weren't the red white and blue of the Machine I owned.
Perhaps my favourite was a '69 Coronet R/T, plain white, black interior, buckets, four-speed, dog-dish hubcaps... that transported me straight back to my late teens. A beautiful car!
Big turnout of Corvettes this year, especially the latest ones, which isn't very interesting because you can see those anytime you want in the showroom of your local Chevy dealer.
There were a number of older Vettes as well, all the way back to the fifties. One that caught my eye was a '62 that looked like it was in barn-find condition, cracked fibreglass and all. I remember seeing one just like it back in the early sixties at Pinehurst Conservation Area down near what is now Cambridge.
At the time, my dad worked at Omark, and they had their annual factory picnic out at Pinehurst. Are factory picnics still a thing?
Anyway, I was impressed with the cool cars some of Dad's coworkers could afford, including a very pretty little '62 Corvette Convertible. It made such an impression on me that I recall it to this day.
In hindsight, it's amazing that factory parking lots used to sport all sorts of the high-end muscle cars. Working-class guys were 99% of the market for those cars.
But times changed. Insurance and pollution regs pretty much put the kibosh on the muscle car genre. Then NAFTA came along. Twenty dollar an hour factory jobs in Ohio or Michigan or right here in Ontario became two dollar an hour jobs in Mexico.
Factory parking lots in my home town aren't that big anymore, because much of the workforce takes the bus. What cars remain in the parking lot are more likely to be fifteen year old Hyundais rather than late model Corvettes.
Thank goodness for progress!
Port Elgin is a little more grass-roots. Pretty much everything there drove to Port Elgin under its own power, which isn't a claim most of the field at Cobble Beach can make.
Port Elgin is where you'll find a late-sixties muscle car that the loving owner spent ten years and all his disposable income restoring.
Cobble Beach is where you'll find the rarest of rarities that the doting owner dropped off at a high end resto shop and dropped several hundred thousand dollars on its restoration.
They are both well worth-while.
There was some very cool stuff on view. How about a '69 SS 427 Yenko Chevelle?
Saw a '67 Impala SS identical to one I owned; 327 Powerglide, but in blue instead of the beigey-brown of mine.
There was a Rebel Machine in red. First one I'd seen although I'd read there was some built that weren't the red white and blue of the Machine I owned.
Perhaps my favourite was a '69 Coronet R/T, plain white, black interior, buckets, four-speed, dog-dish hubcaps... that transported me straight back to my late teens. A beautiful car!
Big turnout of Corvettes this year, especially the latest ones, which isn't very interesting because you can see those anytime you want in the showroom of your local Chevy dealer.
There were a number of older Vettes as well, all the way back to the fifties. One that caught my eye was a '62 that looked like it was in barn-find condition, cracked fibreglass and all. I remember seeing one just like it back in the early sixties at Pinehurst Conservation Area down near what is now Cambridge.
At the time, my dad worked at Omark, and they had their annual factory picnic out at Pinehurst. Are factory picnics still a thing?
Anyway, I was impressed with the cool cars some of Dad's coworkers could afford, including a very pretty little '62 Corvette Convertible. It made such an impression on me that I recall it to this day.
In hindsight, it's amazing that factory parking lots used to sport all sorts of the high-end muscle cars. Working-class guys were 99% of the market for those cars.
But times changed. Insurance and pollution regs pretty much put the kibosh on the muscle car genre. Then NAFTA came along. Twenty dollar an hour factory jobs in Ohio or Michigan or right here in Ontario became two dollar an hour jobs in Mexico.
Factory parking lots in my home town aren't that big anymore, because much of the workforce takes the bus. What cars remain in the parking lot are more likely to be fifteen year old Hyundais rather than late model Corvettes.
Thank goodness for progress!
Saturday, October 1, 2016
Journalism is over
But journalism schools are not. Not yet, anyway.
Sooner or later the young keeners who want to become the next Oriana Fallaci or I.F. Stone will have to face a new reality. There is no place in contemporary journalism for that kind of reportage.
Me and the Farm Manager travelled to Port Elgin today for Pumpkinfest. We go for the cars, not the pumpkins. It costs five bucks to see the pumpkins. The cars are free. It's one of the finest free car shows you'll ever get anywhere.
Thirty years ago I was doing a bit of writing for my college paper, the Ontarion. Interviewed the President of the Ontario Veterinary College for a story. By the time I got home there was a message on my answering machine from his secretary; he'd like to see the story before it came out. As in he'd "like to see" it or else.
Or else what?
He was the top dog at the most prestigious school at U of Goo.
I was a dumbshit undergrad with writerly pretensions.
He wore a Rolex.
I wore a Timex.
Or else what do you think?
Big turn-out of vintage muscle cars today, and also a lot of old pick-ups. My spirits were buoyed by the FM's attraction to a number of fifty's era trucks. I can almost see myself bringing home a mid-fifties hot-rodded F-100 and getting away with it...
Almost.
Nice turn out of sixties and seventies muscle cars; Super Bees, Road Runners, and so forth. What a shame that you can go to your local Subaru dealer and buy a car off the lot that will smoke those "muscle cars" in the quarter mile, never mind what they'll do to you in a corner.
There were a number of big block Chevys on display, including a supercharged Chevelle with wheelie bars. You can go to your local Dodge dealer and order up a four-door Dodge Charger that will leave your supercharged Chevelle with its wheelie bars twenty car-lengths behind in a drag race.
On the way home I stopped at the Korean variety store and picked up my Saturday Globe and Mail for $5.25. Joked with the guy behind the counter about when it might become a six dollar newspaper.
Probably next month, we agreed.
When I related that exchange to the FM, she rejoindered, "journalism is over."
And she's right.
Would Bernstein or Woodward get past their unpaid internship today? Or Seymour Hersh? I doubt it.
Helen Thomas had a great thing going till she ran afoul of the winds of political correctitude.
If those winds are strong enough to silence a veteran journo like her, imagine how they must intimidate some newbie hoping to impress on her unpaid internship.
We've still got a few folks speaking truth to power. Gideon Levy and Robert Fisk come to mind. But by and large the media space is now occupied by complacent and compliant J-school grads who will tweet and blog and Facebook according to their employers expectations.
The Farm Manager was right.
Journalism is over.
Sooner or later the young keeners who want to become the next Oriana Fallaci or I.F. Stone will have to face a new reality. There is no place in contemporary journalism for that kind of reportage.
Me and the Farm Manager travelled to Port Elgin today for Pumpkinfest. We go for the cars, not the pumpkins. It costs five bucks to see the pumpkins. The cars are free. It's one of the finest free car shows you'll ever get anywhere.
Thirty years ago I was doing a bit of writing for my college paper, the Ontarion. Interviewed the President of the Ontario Veterinary College for a story. By the time I got home there was a message on my answering machine from his secretary; he'd like to see the story before it came out. As in he'd "like to see" it or else.
Or else what?
He was the top dog at the most prestigious school at U of Goo.
I was a dumbshit undergrad with writerly pretensions.
He wore a Rolex.
I wore a Timex.
Or else what do you think?
Big turn-out of vintage muscle cars today, and also a lot of old pick-ups. My spirits were buoyed by the FM's attraction to a number of fifty's era trucks. I can almost see myself bringing home a mid-fifties hot-rodded F-100 and getting away with it...
Almost.
Nice turn out of sixties and seventies muscle cars; Super Bees, Road Runners, and so forth. What a shame that you can go to your local Subaru dealer and buy a car off the lot that will smoke those "muscle cars" in the quarter mile, never mind what they'll do to you in a corner.
There were a number of big block Chevys on display, including a supercharged Chevelle with wheelie bars. You can go to your local Dodge dealer and order up a four-door Dodge Charger that will leave your supercharged Chevelle with its wheelie bars twenty car-lengths behind in a drag race.
On the way home I stopped at the Korean variety store and picked up my Saturday Globe and Mail for $5.25. Joked with the guy behind the counter about when it might become a six dollar newspaper.
Probably next month, we agreed.
When I related that exchange to the FM, she rejoindered, "journalism is over."
And she's right.
Would Bernstein or Woodward get past their unpaid internship today? Or Seymour Hersh? I doubt it.
Helen Thomas had a great thing going till she ran afoul of the winds of political correctitude.
If those winds are strong enough to silence a veteran journo like her, imagine how they must intimidate some newbie hoping to impress on her unpaid internship.
We've still got a few folks speaking truth to power. Gideon Levy and Robert Fisk come to mind. But by and large the media space is now occupied by complacent and compliant J-school grads who will tweet and blog and Facebook according to their employers expectations.
The Farm Manager was right.
Journalism is over.
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Concours d'pumpkinfest
Every October the folks down the road in Port Elgin put on their "pumpkinfest" fall fair extravaganza. What gets the headlines is the giant pumpkin weigh-in. This year's winner came in at a whopping 1545 pounds!
If ogling giant gourds is not your cup of tea, there's an even better reason to hit pumpkinfest. The car show.
Unlike the Concours d'elegance put on at Cobble Beach a few weeks back, this one is free, and while there was no Bugatti on display, there was more than enough to make your eyes glaze over. In fact, the car show has become so well known that even big league car guys like Jay Leno have been known to drop in.
The citizens of Port block off a good chunk of their downtown for the weekend, and you've got literally a couple of dozen blocks lined on both sides of the street with everything from rat-rods to retro-cruisers to the cream of Detroit's high-water era, the '60s. There's even a block's worth of choppers if you're a two-wheel fanatic.
Virtually everything at the Port Elgin car show gets driven to the meet, and the focus is on cruisers and muscle cars. There must have been at least half a dozen big-block Novas on view, each more pristine than the last.
One car that did arrive on a trailer was also at the Cobble Beach event. That was one of the ultra-rare 64 Fairlane Thunderbolts that Ford built a very limited number of. These were strictly intended for drag racing only, and came with the 427 motor stuffed into the smallish Fairlane chassis. A documented Thunderbolt commands in the range of a quarter million dollars today.
My favorite of the show had to be that cherry red '62 Pontiac Grand Prix... or maybe that '62 Dart with the 413... or that 409 Impala SS with the twin four-barrels...
If ogling giant gourds is not your cup of tea, there's an even better reason to hit pumpkinfest. The car show.
Unlike the Concours d'elegance put on at Cobble Beach a few weeks back, this one is free, and while there was no Bugatti on display, there was more than enough to make your eyes glaze over. In fact, the car show has become so well known that even big league car guys like Jay Leno have been known to drop in.
The citizens of Port block off a good chunk of their downtown for the weekend, and you've got literally a couple of dozen blocks lined on both sides of the street with everything from rat-rods to retro-cruisers to the cream of Detroit's high-water era, the '60s. There's even a block's worth of choppers if you're a two-wheel fanatic.
Virtually everything at the Port Elgin car show gets driven to the meet, and the focus is on cruisers and muscle cars. There must have been at least half a dozen big-block Novas on view, each more pristine than the last.
One car that did arrive on a trailer was also at the Cobble Beach event. That was one of the ultra-rare 64 Fairlane Thunderbolts that Ford built a very limited number of. These were strictly intended for drag racing only, and came with the 427 motor stuffed into the smallish Fairlane chassis. A documented Thunderbolt commands in the range of a quarter million dollars today.
My favorite of the show had to be that cherry red '62 Pontiac Grand Prix... or maybe that '62 Dart with the 413... or that 409 Impala SS with the twin four-barrels...
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